Vernon's blog

Using the Places module (or Gadget) in e17 or enlightenment

2011-10-05T23:31:00.022-04:00

Apparently the new version of the enlightenment window manager (called e17 as of now) trys to use udisks instead of hal. But some of the modules, such as Places, have not been updated to use udisks yet.

So, if you load the "Places" module, and then add the Places gadget to, say, your bottom shelf in enlightenment, it may look something like this:So it just shows a blank grey area with no Gadget in it. Not to mention that if you plug a usb device in, the Places module will not detect it. So in order to fix this, I did this:

Solution

1) installed the hal daemon from here.
   a) if you are using archlinux, 
      first install cower from the AUR, and then ...
   b) cower -d -d hal-git
   c) make dependencies first if needed
      I only needed hal-info I think
   d) cd hal-git
   d) makepkg -s
   e) sudo pacman -U hal-git-someDateYouBuiltIt-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
2) Then start the hal daemon
   For archlinux users, probably # /etc/rc.d/hal start
3) removed the old Places gadget from my shelf
   right click the Places gadget 
   (which is just a blank area) -> Gedget Places -> Remove
4) unloaded the Places module
   left click desktop -> settings -> modules -> Places -> unload
5) restarted enlightenment 
   left click desktop -> enlightenment -> restart
6) reloaded the Places module 
   left click desktop -> settings -> modules -> Places -> load
7) added the Places gadget to my shelf 
   left click shelf -> settings -> gadgets -> Places -> add gadget
8) plugged in a usb camera ...
   watched it appear as a new device on the shelf ...
   inside the Places gadget ... Yay!
9) Right Click Places -> Gadget Places -> Move to -> Desktop

My Places gadget on the desktop now looks like this with a camera plugged into a usb port:
And when I click on it, it opens a file manager, and shows me the files on my camera ... imagine that. Hope this blog post helps get the Places module working on your desktop.

The day of the cross

2011-05-10T13:07:00.007-04:00

This is an update to my earlier post on this subject. You can download Celestia and see what happened on April 3 of 33 A.D. for yourself with this handy little celestia script. Just save the script to your desktop, launch Celestia, and click File, Open Script, and select the file you downloaded. It appears that this script needed some adjustments for the newest version of Celestia 1.6.0.

Enjoy.

P.S. If anyone knows from the change logs, which revision it was in Celestia which caused this script to need adjustment, please let me know. Thanks.

Flex Jam Orlando 2011

2011-05-03T12:58:00.003-04:00

Flex Jam with Greg Wilson, James Ward, and Holly Schinsky .... jamesward.com
gregsramblings.com
devgirl.org

Errors: unable to open 'C:\Documents and Settings\geek\Adobe Flash Builder 4.5\TourDeMobileFlex\libs

2011-05-03T11:06:00.002-04:00

Description Resource Path Location Type
unable to open 'C:\Documents and Settings\geek\Adobe Flash Builder 4.5\TourDeMobileFlex\libs' TourDeMobileFlex Unknown Flex Problem

Do not worry about this ...

Right click "TourDeMobileFlex" -> New -> Folder
Then just type "libs" in for the Folder name, and click Finish.

Hope that helps.

error: SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK.

2011-05-03T10:35:00.005-04:00

$ git clone https://github.com/someguy/hisApp.git
Cloning into hisApp ...
error: SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details:
error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed while accessing https://github.com/someguy/hisApp.git/info/refs

fatal: HTTP request failed

If this happens to you ... no problem.

$ env GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY=true git clone https://github.com/someguy/hisApp.git

Hope that helps.

James Gosling now working at Google

2011-03-29T15:06:00.007-04:00

Do Good Anyway

2011-03-15T23:17:00.000-04:00

* People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.

* If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.

* If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway.

* If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway.

* What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway.

* If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway.

* The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway.

* Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway.

* In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.

-- Mother Theresa

If you did not like this, try Beautiful Thoughts anyway.

Cứ làm tốt luôn luôn

2011-03-15T22:20:00.007-04:00

* Người chung quanh chúng ta thường làm những điều vô lý, vớ vẩn, và ích kỷ. Tha thứ luôn luôn.

* Nếu bạn tử tế, có thể bạn bị tố cáo là bạn ích kỷ và có mưu đồ xấu. Tử tế luôn luôn.

* Nếu bạn thành công, bạn sẽ được một ít bạn không trung thành, và người thù nguyên thủy. Thành công luôn luôn.

* Nếu bạn là ngay thật, có thể bạn bị họ lừa. Cứ ngay thật luôn luôn.

* Những cái bạn chế tạo ra tốn thật nhiều thời gian, người ta có thể phá hoại trong chốc lát. Cứ chế tạo luôn luôn.

* Nếu bạn tìm được niềm vui và điều yên tịnh, người chung quanh bạn sẽ ghen tị. Cứ giữ niềm vui đó luôn luôn.

* Những gì tốt bạn làm hôm nay có thể không ai nhớ ngày mai. Cứ làm tốt luôn luôn.

* Hãy cho thế giới điều tốt nhất bạn có và chảng bao giờ đủ. Cứ cho điều tốt nhất luôn luôn.

* Đến lúc cuối, bạn sẽ thấy chỉ giửa bạn với Chúa. Chẳng bao giờ bạn với những người kia luôn luôn.

-- Mẹ Teresa

Nếu bạn không thích bài này, cứ thử Lời Hay Ý Đẹp luôn luôn.

Howto explore files on your Blackberry

2011-03-11T14:10:00.007-05:00

Have you ever wanted to just explore files on your Blackberry?
The short answer is Media -> Menu -> Explore.
The long answer with screenshots is:

1. Navigate to your "Media" folder
2. Click the "Blackberry button" or menu button, or the button the is usually to the left of your trackpad or trackball
3. Then select "Explore"

You should get this menu below, which let's you choose between your SDCard and your on device memory:

Hope that helps.

PrimeFaces rocks ...

2011-03-11T11:43:00.005-05:00

Location aware PrimeFaces mobile maps works fine on this BlackBerry OS 6 browser:

Read more about it here. By the way, the location above is Downtown Disney.

Dictionary - Từ điển (cập nhật)

2011-03-07T14:44:00.018-05:00

Chắc nhiều người biết một trang web tiện dụng cho dịch một ngôn ngữ, nhưng tôi quyết định cập nhật cái trang web này đặc biệt cho các trình duyệt web di động được cho người nào chóng dịch một vài từ nhanh hoặc từ tiếng Anh sang tiếng Việt hoặc tiếng Việt sang tiếng Anh bằng Google Translate. Xin vui lòng với.

Many folks probably have a handy page for translating some language, but I decided to update this web page specifically for mobile browsers to allow folks to quickly translate a few words from either English to Vietnamese or Vietnamese to English using Google Translate. Enjoy.

This one is one for Vietnamese:
http://lightcloud.verns.net/mobile/vi/index.html

Here is one for Spanish also:
http://lightcloud.verns.net/mobile/es/index.html

Page rendering using iPhone (photo taken with a BlackBerry Bold 9700 :-)

Page rendering using BlackBerry OS 6.0.0.448 (photo taken with an android phone):

I didn't even bother posting a picture taken with an iPhone ... it was just too sad.

X and such ...

2011-03-03T14:07:00.023-05:00

So the other day, a gentleman that I respect sent several of us an email stating:

Ok, so remember now, next week we are going to do "X and such" ...

I thought about his email and replied to him asking, "Thank you so much for the timely reminder. And could you also explain for me, why it is that we are going to do 'X and such'?" Shortly there after, I received an emotional email in alternating Caps Lock, explaining:

Well! EVeRY year wE do "X and such"! And ... we have already anNOUNced it. We have announced bEFORe hand that we will do "X and such"!

So I thought this would make a great Monty Python skit, as follows:

John Cleese: Ok. Today we will commence with beating our faces against the wall with all our might. All ready now? And ... G! go? ..."

(interrupted)

Idiot: Excuse me. Excuse me! But what is this about beating your heads against the wall with all your might? I mean, why should we all be doing this?

John Cleese (Incensed): W(H)ell! Every year ... Every year! We beat our faces against the wall with all our might. And ... And we've announced it already. We have announced that we will be beating our faces against the wall with all our might. We ALWAYS announce before hand that we are about to do this, so that there is no question about our intentions.

(pause)

Now then! If there are no more questions about it ... let us commence immediately with the beating of our faces against these hallowed walls with all our might.

Several folks that I've related this story to have asked, "What is 'X and such'"? Or, "Who was this?"

Does it really matter what "X and such" is? or who it is that requires "X and such"? Isn't it reasonable sometimes to ask why?

What do you think?

X11 error: BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)

2011-02-26T20:13:00.020-05:00

If you have gotten this error, or maybe just a blue screen with mplayer or a black window with no video in vlc, just try changing the video output driver:

$ mplayer -vo x11 some_video.wmv
or
$ vlc --vout x11 some_video.wmv

You can also use "mplayer -vo help" to get a list of available video output drivers, if you think x11 is not right for you, as follows:

$ mplayer -vo help
MPlayer SVN-r31628-4.4.4 (C) 2000-2010 MPlayer Team
Available video output drivers:
   vdpau       VDPAU with X11
   xv          X11/Xv
   gl_nosw     OpenGL no software rendering
   x11         X11 ( XImage/Shm )
   xover       General X11 driver for overlay capable video output drivers
   sdl         SDL YUV/RGB/BGR renderer (SDL v1.1.7+ only!)
   gl          OpenGL
   gl2         X11 (OpenGL) - multiple textures version
   dga         DGA ( Direct Graphic Access V2.0 )
   fbdev       Framebuffer Device
   fbdev2      Framebuffer Device
   matrixview  MatrixView (OpenGL)
   aa          AAlib
   caca        libcaca
   dxr3        DXR3/H+ video out
   v4l2        V4L2 MPEG Video Decoder Output
   xvidix      X11 (VIDIX)
   cvidix      console VIDIX
   null        Null video output
   xvmc        XVideo Motion Compensation
   mpegpes     MPEG-PES to DVB card
   yuv4mpeg    yuv4mpeg output for mjpegtools
   png         PNG file
   jpeg        JPEG file
   gif89a      animated GIF output
   tga         Targa output
   pnm         PPM/PGM/PGMYUV file
   md5sum      md5sum of each frame

Hope that helps.

How to grab the triggers from a SQL Server database

2011-02-16T15:30:00.005-05:00

Have you ever needed to get the script that created a trigger on a table in a SQL Server database?

Try this:

select b.text
from sysobjects a
join syscomments b on a.id=b.id
where xtype='TR'

Hope that helps.

How do I get a list of commit comments from CVS after the given date or change?

2011-01-05T17:48:00.009-05:00

The short answer is ... use subversion or git instead of cvs, and you will get your answer pretty quickly.

You may have made a bunch of changes to a number of files in a project, and made sure that every commit (usually at the file level) was accompanied by a comment of what was changed.

Then you may have asked yourself, is there a way to get a list from CVS of these comments on changes since some particular version?

Well, I had the same problem and here is how I quickly got all of the comments out of cvs from a given revision until the latest:

$ mkdir ~/repo
$ cd ~/repo
$ mkdir cvs
$ cd cvs
$ scp -pr geek@avoid.cvs.org:/cvs/CVSROOT .
$ mkdir -p my/favorite
$ cd my/favorite
$ scp -pr geek@avoid.cvs.org:/cvs/my/favorite/project .
$ cd ~/repo
$ mkdir -p ~/repo/svn/my/favorite/project
$ cvs2svn -s ~/repo/svn/my/favorite/project/src ~/repo/cvs/my/favorite/project/src
$ mkdir ~/work
$ cd ~/work
$ svn checkout file:///home/geek/repo/svn/my/favorite/project/src/trunk ./src
$ cd src
$ # get the comments made from revision 5 until today
$ svn log -r 5:HEAD
$ # get the comments made from 2010-07-03 until today
$ svn log -r {2010-07-03}:HEAD

The basic idea is to just use svn or git instead of cvs :-)
And that can be done by converting the cvs repo to svn or git using cvs2svn or cvs2git, which we should be doing anyway. It got my my answer within about three minutes because I had a small repository.

Hope that helps.

Problems with a Vietnamese character on mobile devices

2011-01-03T00:41:00.025-05:00

Currently I am running version 5.0.0.714 of the BlackBerry OS on my bold 9700, because my carrier has not released the latest version 6 of the OS for my phone. Still version 5 is pretty mature, and so I was surprised to run across this bug with rendering a particular Vietnamese letter.

On my BlackBerry, whether I am using the blackberry browser, gmail, blackberry's messenger, or opera mini, the blackberry renders the character ờ, which is unicode U+1EDD, as the character ớ, which is unicode unicode U+1EDB.

Here is a blown up screenshot of the two _different_ characters "ờ ớ" on the BlackBerry noted above using blackberry's messenger application:
This is the same way that it looks in all of the applications noted above using BlackBerry OS 5.0.0.714.

Curiously, I also found that this same rendering problem is happening on my Android phone for the same email. And the issue is also happening using with Android web browser in pages like this one. So it looks like several mobile platforms are having this issue. And now that I think of it, this blog post would be much harder to understand if you are reading it on a mobile device which has this bug.

On the other hand if I use LogicMail, which is currently the most popular open source email client available for the BlackBerry, and I turn on the "Unicode normalization" feature in the configuration, here is the resulting screen shot from the same email:
What is nice about this feature of LogicMail is that it improves your ability to read Vietnamese emails whether you are running older versions of the OS or not, so anyone whose carrier (or company) has locked them into older versions of the BlackBerry OS, can still get the benefit of LogicMail's unicode normalization option. Open source is great.

I wonder if this is still an issue with BlackBerry OS 6. If it is then these two different characters will look the same: ờ ớ

Maybe you can let us know in the comments below.

Incidentally, this character must be from the same family of characters which appear to be quite popular on reddit.com.

Fedora - Google Earth: /opt/google-earth/libIGGfx.so ... Permission denied

2010-11-30T10:06:00.006-05:00

Your install of Google Earth went fine ...

But then when you try to run Google earth, you get an error something like this:
/opt/google-earth/libIGGfx.so ... Permission denied.

Or you may find this in your /var/log/messages:
Nov 30 09:49:42 lost setroubleshoot: SELinux is preventing /opt/google-earth/googleearth-bin "execmod" access to /opt/google-earth/libIGGfx.so. For complete SELinux messages. run sealert -l e4e45dc0-14cf-49dc-af60-8c8e7e916bdf

Don't worry, just run as root:

# cd /opt/google-earth
# for file in `ls /opt/google-earth` ; do echo "SeLinux type in " $file; chcon -t textrel_shlib_t $file; done

You may still have problems like I did if you are behind a proxy.

so I added this to the beginning of the command to launch google earth:
env http_proxy=http://my.favorite.proxy.com:8080

so now the launch command is:
env http_proxy=http://my.favorite.proxy.com:8080 /opt/google-earth/googleearth %f

Hope that helps.

Khát Khao Dòng Nước

2010-11-25T01:23:00.003-05:00

Bài này làm tôi yên lòng ...

* Here are the chords and lyrics.
* Lượm lời bài với hợp âm ở đây.

Enjoy.
Hãy vui long hát với à.

PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of X bytes exhausted (tried to allocate Y bytes) in /var/www/html/mediawiki/includes/Exif.php

2010-09-08T16:04:00.007-04:00

Have you ever gotten an error like this:

PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of X bytes exhausted (tried to allocate Y bytes) in /var/www/html/mediawiki/includes/Exif.php on line 1018, referer: http://my.favorite.wiki.info/mediawiki

Well, do not worry, here is how you can fix it ... Just edit the LocalSettings.php for your wiki, and change the line that says "ini_set( 'memory_limit', '20M' );" to something like "ini_set( 'memory_limit', '32M' );".

Don't you just love magic numbers in your code?

gedit: Segmentation fault

2010-08-20T15:12:00.003-04:00

Do not worry. If you get this error:

Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "atk-bridge": libatk-bridge.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "gail-gnome": libgail-gnome.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

** (gedit:2133): WARNING **: Private typelib 'Gedit-3.0' not found
Segmentation fault

This was only happening briefly between updates of fedora rawhide. The problem occurred when I was using gedit 1:2.31.5-1.fc14 and kernel 2.6.34-20.fc14.i686.PAE. It looks like it is a hiccup with the new switch from gtk2 to gtk3.

After simply running yum update, now gedit 2:2.30.2-2.fc14 is installed. And it is working fine.

Unicode Normalization Forms: Interesting issue with Google Translation services and APIs

2010-08-16T13:25:00.012-04:00

Drawing on my limited knowledge of the ocean of information which is the mashup of the basic multilingual plane (BMP) and Google AJAX Language API, it looks like the Gtranslate callbacks return inconsistent portions of the BMP for Vietnamese.

For example "Hello girl" vs. "Hello grandma" translated into Vietnamese ...

0000000 042 103 150 141 315 200 157 040 143 303 264 042 012
          "   C   h   a 315 200   o       c 303 264   "  \n
0000015

0000000 042 130 151 156 040 143 150 303 240 157 040 142 303 240 042 012
          "   X   i   n       c   h 303 240   o       b 303 240   "  \n
0000020

At first glance, it looks to me like the first one comes back as NFKD and the second one comes back as NFC. It is great that the translator is more polite with Grandma, hence the extra word of deference "Xin", but that is not the difference I am noting here. But rather it is the "à" in the word "chào" that comes back two different ways.

Maybe there is some option somewhere in Google's APIs that allows you to specify the range of unicode characters you want to work from when translating. If anyone knows this, please comment.

Note: Here are two command lines I used to test this:

$ wget -O - "http://www.google.com/uds/Gtranslate?callback=google.language.callbacks.id101&context=22&q=Hello%20girl&langpair=en%7Cvi&key=notsupplied&v=1.0" 2>>/dev/null | cut -d: -f2 | cut -d"}" -f1 | od -bc

$ wget -O - "http://www.google.com/uds/Gtranslate?callback=google.language.callbacks.id101&context=22&q=Hello%20grandma&langpair=en%7Cvi&key=notsupplied&v=1.0" 2>>/dev/null | cut -d: -f2 | cut -d"}" -f1 | od -bc

It looks like this issue is happening in IE7, Firefox, and Android browsers as of this post, but it is not happening on the BlackBerry browser here on my Bold 9700. Looks like the BlackBerry OS is still backward compatible with decomposed forms as well as NFC now. I wonder how it works on the iPhone, but I will not lose any sleep over not knowing.

Dictionary - Từ điển

2010-08-02T19:01:00.014-04:00

Chắc nhiều người biết một trang web tiện dụng cho dịch một ngôn ngữ, nhưng tôi quyết định tạo ra cái này đặc biệt cho các trình duyệt web di động được cho người nào chóng dịch một vài từ nhanh hoặc từ tiếng Anh sang tiếng Việt hoặc tiếng Việt sang tiếng Anh bằng Google Translate. Xin vui lòng với.

Many folks probably have a handy page for translating some language, but I decided to create this one specifically for mobile browsers to allow folks to quickly translate a few words from either English to Vietnamese or Vietnamese to English using Google Translate. Enjoy.

This one is one for Vietnamese:
http://lightcloud.verns.net/mobile/vi/index.html

Here is one for Spanish also:
http://lightcloud.verns.net/mobile/es/index.html

Cô Hàng Nước

2010-07-21T00:24:00.010-04:00

Nhà tôi chọn bài này ...

* Here are the chords and lyrics.
* Lượm lời bài với hợp âm ở đây.

Enjoy.
Hãy vui long hát với à.

Google Translate "Side-by-Side View"

2010-07-13T11:11:00.016-04:00

Google translate has a great feature where you can not only paste in your favorite text or url to some page in a foreign language, but you can display the translation in a "Side-by-Side View".

Here is an example of a bad translation. In case you do not read Vietnamese, one reason why it is a "bad" translation, is because it basically translates "Jesus loves me" into "I love Jesus", which, I'm sure, is funny for people with sick brains.

It appears that Google translate tries to remember your preferences as to "Side-by-Side View" or the default "Top-Bottom View", and I cannot figure out how to get a "Side-by-Side View" parameter in the urls here, so you will have to click the "Side-by-Side View" icon in the upper right hand side of the page.

Here is an example of a good or at least useful translation. It seems as though, the fewer words or ideas you have on each line, the more useful the translation is.

monobook dark

2010-06-23T00:59:00.013-04:00

Sometimes these white backgrounds are just too much. So, I created a dark version of the default monobook skin for mediawiki. You can take a look at it in live action here.

And here is the download of the skin if you want to try it out. Just unzip it into your mediawiki/skins directory and put a copy of your logo at /mediawiki/skins/common/images/wiki_dark.jpg

Enjoy.

Animals ...

2010-06-19T22:30:00.008-04:00

Mommy found more than one turtle ...

The girls found some baby birds in their nest ...

This duck is always hanging around ...

I think this one has more hair on his head than me ... sigh.

Understanding unicode ... a 5 minute deep dive

2010-06-18T16:04:00.042-04:00

While Unicode provides a number for each character in our universe, there is also a "Unicode transformation format" that is an encoding for each of those characters. And it is this encoded character format that is actually used on the wild, wild web pages you are looking at now.

So basically, for each character, there is a number, called a Unicode number, and then there is an encoding of that character called the Unicode transformation format for the character. The most common encoding on the web at this time is called utf-8.

Not many people including myself can remember all of the details of unicodes, so I thought that this brief explanation could help lots of folks. Web developers might want to understand how a browser actually grabs a character on a web page of the wild, wild web and transforms it from the binary bits that it starts with into a Unicode character, and then figures out which of the fonts at hand have a character matching that Unicode value, or vice versa.

So, the following is an example showing the basics of how to convert from the Unicode number of a character to the Unicode Transformation Format using the 8-bit blocks that are used on the web. Stated another way, below it is shown how to convert from a Unicode number to utf-8.

From a Unicode number to UTF-8

Let's start with a non-English character ệ and its unicode number which is U+1EC7, and give you the answer right away, which is "E1BB87" in utf-8 hex. Now, let me show you how to get from U+1EC7 to "E1BB87".

Using the following "table A" from the request for comments, in this case, RFC 3629:

Char. number range  |        UTF-8 octet sequence
   (hexadecimal)    |              (binary)
--------------------+---------------------------------------------
0000 0000-0000 007F | 0xxxxxxx
0000 0080-0000 07FF | 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
0000 0800-0000 FFFF | 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
0001 0000-0010 FFFF | 11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

Step 1.

Determine the number of octets required from the character number and the first column of the table above. So our unicode value of 1EC7 for the character ệ places us on the third row between 0800 and FFFF:

0000 0800-0000 FFFF | 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

And here are some math details describing 1EC7:
   1    E    C    7 in hex
   1   14   12    7 in decimal
   1   16   14    7 in octal
0001 1110 1100 0111 in binary

Step 2.

Prepare the high-order bits in accordance with the second column of table A.

Since 1EC7 is between 0800 and FFFF, the given binary is:
1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx which shows the little x(s) for 4 bits and then more x(s) for an additional 6 bits and then more x(s) for an additional 6 bits for a total of 16 bits or 16 x(s). And since 16 bits is equivalent to 2 bytes, it is understandable why some people refer to this as double byte encoding, even though the final number of bytes in utf-8 for this character will be three.

So the high order bits will be:
1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

And the low order bits will be:
0001 1110 1100 0111

As follows:
   1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
  +    0001   111011   000111
   --------------------------
   11100001 10111011 10000111

and then the math details to get us to hex bytes:

1110 0001 1011 1011 1000 0111 in binary
  16    1   10   13   10    7 in octal
  14    1    8   11    8    7 in decimal
   E    1    B    B    8    7 in hex

Finally, the unicode number U+1EC7 encodes to the three hex bytes E1 BB 87 of utf-8. And these utf-8 bytes are what you will actually find on a web page of the wild, wild web.

A Handy cross check

If you like perl, you can use "perldoc -f pack" and you will find:

B A bit string (descending bit order inside each byte).
H A hex string (high nybble first).

So here is a line of perl code that verifies the hex and binary answer found above for the character ệ:

$ echo "ệ" | perl -lpe 'print unpack "H*"; $_ = unpack "B*";'
e1bb87
111000011011101110000111

Conclusion

You can easily see how this algorithm works both backwards and forwards. Well, a browser can use these same steps in reverse in order to figure out what character in its font matrix to use for rendering the bytes "e1 bb 87" that it pulled off of a web page in the wild.

Hope that helps you understand the web a little better. Enjoy.

References

For more details you could start with the following documents:
RFC 3629
Look up characters given a unicode number
Look up unicode numbers given a character

[WARNING] Unable to get resource 'org.someorg.project:project-proto:pom:some-version' from repository project-repo (http://repository.somecompany.com/

2010-06-17T14:50:00.006-04:00

Do not worry, you are probably just behind a proxy. Try putting a file named "~/.m2/settings.xml " in your home directory's maven directory, or wherever your .m2 directory is:

Make the contents of the file something like this:

<settings>
  <proxies>
   <proxy>
      <active>true</active>
      <protocol>http</protocol>
      <host>proxy.somewhere.com</host>
      <port>8080</port>
      <username>proxyuser</username>
      <password>somepassword</password>
      <nonProxyHosts>www.google.com|*.somewhere.com</nonProxyHosts>
    </proxy>
  </proxies>
</settings>

Replacing all of the relevant bits and removing any unnecessary lines, like username and password, if they are not needed.

Hope that helps.

A few of us ...

2010-06-11T18:02:00.002-04:00

Hi.

Tình Ca Du Mục

2010-05-23T01:31:00.013-04:00

She likes this song. So do I.
Nhà tôi thích bài này. Tôi cũng vậy.

* Here are the chords and lyrics.
* Lượm lời bài với hợp âm ở đây.

Enjoy.
Hãy vui long với à.

Red Roses for a Blue Lady

2010-05-08T00:47:00.012-04:00

Played on a modest mahogany ukulele made by Cordoba ... model 20TM-CE. I was feeling a bit edgy and put a low g string on it that was made for a concert uke, but it was long enough for this tenor and sounded ok ??? ... I guess I got a bit out of control, but it was fun.

* Here are the chords and lyrics.

Enjoy.

The Linux

2010-05-03T16:00:00.015-04:00

Linux is now a definite article according to this story. Here is some of the evidence:

The team at Adobe can now use the Google’s open source Android platform which is similar to the Linux but for your mobile.

It's about time.

"The Google" on the other hand ... Impetuous.

I'll Soar

2010-04-07T03:14:00.010-04:00

Finally got around to writing a gospel parody of Jason Mraz's "I'm Yours" and played it on a concert uke for fun ...

* Here are the chords and lyrics.

Enjoy.

jQuery's show() function does not work on my BlackBerry ... sometimes :-)

2010-03-09T12:04:00.046-05:00

Sometimes the show function in jQuery does not work in the (4.6.1) BlackBerry browser. Below is a detailed explanation the problem, followed by a solution showing how to fix this, and then an educated guess at the reason for the problem:

1) The problem may occur if you have something like the following javascript code in your web page:

<script src="js/jquery-1.4.1.min.js" ></script>
<script>
$(document).ready( function() {
   $('div.features').hide();           // hide all divs of class="features"
   $('div.features').first().show();   // show the first div of class "features"
});
</script>
<script>
function reveal(featureId) {
   $('div.features').hide();      // hide all divs of class="features"
   $('div#' + featureId).show();  // show the div with id=featureId
}
</script>
...
<select onchange="reveal(this.options[selectedIndex].value)" > 
   <option value="feature1" >BB Browser feature 1</option> 
   <option value="feature2" >BB Browser feature 2</option> 
   <option value="feature3" >BB Browser feature 3</option>
</select>
<div id="feature1" class="features">BB Browser feature 1</div>
<div id="feature2" class="features">BB Browser feature 2</div>
<div id="feature3" class="features">BB Browser feature 3</div>
...

Now if the "reveal" function is called using the <select onchange="reveal(...)"> as shown above, the call to the show() function will sometimes not have the desired effect of changing the display style of the div from "none" to "block".

2) My suggested solution or fix for this:
Use .css("display", "block") instead of .show()

3) Why is this happening only on my BlackBerry?
It appears that on the BlackBerry browser (at least the version noted) there is a race condition that causes this as follows:

a) Sometimes jQuery's data cache of the display values is set before the $(document).ready function is called, and so the styles are all cached as "display:block" which results in the expected behavior.

b) but sometimes jQuery's data cache of the display values occurs after the $(document).ready function is called, and so the styles are cached as "display:none" (except for the first one in this example). Which results in only being able to "reveal" the first feature ... jQuery's show() function is in fact getting called in any case. It is simply setting the display style to the cached value which is "none" in this case.

c) It appears that this issue starts occurring only after returning to the page a few times, or by returning to the page using a bookmark. You can try it here with your BlackBerry browser.

There may be some magic jQuery function that could be called in $(document).ready function before the hide(s) take place to make sure that jQuery's data cache is populated with the desired values first, but I'll leave that and any other errors in this discription of the issue to the jQuery experts in the comments below :-)

Hope that helps.

NOTE: This was discovered while testing with a BlackBerry 8350i running v4.6.1.204 of the BlackBerry OS using the jQuery.fn.show function with javascript turned on, of course.
NOTE: This was discovered using jquery-1.4.1.min.js
NOTE: Could not reproduce this issue using a BlackBerry 9700 running v5.0.0.330 of the BlackBerry OS ... it just works fine.

The good and the bad ...

2010-03-04T10:44:00.006-05:00

How many trashy youtube videos get advertised for us to see? How many comments are made about each and every detail of those videos? Now let's examine the other edge of the sword of truth. How many good things can you find in a video like this ...

Discuss.

Error getting repository data for rawhide, repository not found

2010-02-23T09:07:00.010-05:00

If you get this error, do not worry. This issue is "normal" with Fedora. No other distro that I am aware of changes your default repositories without letting you know, except Fedora. So that is the problem. Yum has decided to replace your /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-rawhide.repo file with NOTHING.

So you can issue the following command:

# cp /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-rawhide.repo.rpmnew /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-rawhide.repo

And you may be back to normal.

I say you "may" be back to normal, because, in my case, there is still an issue. I am behind a "transparent" proxy and the folks who update the fedora-rawhide.repo file love to use https. Well, this causes me to get the following error: "Cannot retrieve metalink for repository: rawhide. Please verify its path and try again". If you simply edit the fedora-rawhide.repo file and change the https to http, updates work fine.

It appears that there is some software downstream from the fedora-rawhide.repo parsing that has problems conducting https through our "transparent" proxy ... imagine that.

Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_nvidia.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

2010-02-11T14:33:00.018-05:00

Do not worry. Here is the solution to your problem:

Answer: Just try specifying a video output driver on the command line when you launch mplayer like this:

mplayer -vo xv video.wmv

You can get a list of "Available video output drivers" with the command "mplayer -vo help".

Details, if you are interested:

The problem is that the selected (or default) video output driver was vdpau, and no one working on the mplayer packages and software cares enough about having the software package work with your configuration of hardware and software. But do not worry, you are now blessed with this answer, and the video output driver can be specified on the command line (e.g. -vo xv).

The order of configuration options that mplayer will scrawl before it finally decides to (only) try the (missing) vdpau driver is not so obvious, but I think it roughly goes like this:

1. Check the ~/.mplayer/config for the (user specific) default video output driver, if any
2. Then check /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf for the (system specific) default video output driver, if any
3. Then check in the compile options that mplayer was built with for a default (build specific).

If the mplayer command you were using was compiled with the vdpau option and there are no default video output drivers specified in ~/.mplayer/config or /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf (which is either a common occurrence or I am the only person on the planet earth who has ever had problems with a configuration option on a linux box) then it will fall back to the compiled default which in this case was vdpau.

More details, imagine that:

Another similar issue is that mplayer may work fine while gmplayer gives this same error using the same options you just tried with mplayer. Well guess what? gmplayer uses yet another config file, ~/.mplayer/gui.conf, and it will default to the last video driver specified (or defaulted to in the compile options). So again, just specify a video output driver on the command line, or put one in one of the myriad of config files mentioned here.

Hope that helps.

Kick users out of terminal services in Windows Server

2010-02-09T13:48:00.003-05:00

If you need to boot some users out of terminal services in Windows Server, try the following:

1) Start
2) All Programs
3) Administrative Tools
4) Terminal Services Manager (this is also called tsadmin.exe)
5) Right click on the user you want to boot in the "Users" tab and click
6a) Disconnect - which may leave some of their applications running, I guess
or
6b) Log Off - which will log the user off, and should kill any processes they have running.

Of course you will need Administrator privileges to do this.

Since Windows limits you to 2 remote sessions, if someone has two disconnected sessions, you will not be able to log in without additional software, imagine that. So instead you could try using a different operating system that treats administrators like first class citizens.

You are required to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function.

2010-01-20T15:28:00.006-05:00

warning: strtotime(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EST/-5.0/no DST' instead in /var/www/html/drupal-6.15/modules/node/node.module on line 802.

If you get an error something like this. Do not worry. Just edit your /etc/php.ini file (the location of yours may differ) and add an entry for the date.timezone that should look something like this:

date.timezone = "America/New_York"

Then restart your webserver:

service httpd restart

Of course, your commands for restarting your webserver may be different depending on your lifestyle. But, no more errors from php functions trying to figure out what time it is.

Hope that helps.

Solution: Cannot create a desktop icon in KDE version 4.x

2010-01-04T16:12:00.003-05:00

If you cannot create a link to your favorite application in KDE version 4, do not worry. Here is a procedure that may help you:

1) right click on your desktop
2) click "Desktop Activity Settings"
3) select "Activity" from the list on the left
4) change the "Activity Type" from "Desktop" to "Folder View"
5) click "Apply"
6) click "Ok"

Now you should be able to:
1) right click on your desktop
2) Create New
3) Link to Application

Hope that helps.

I have no idea why the KDE folks think that we should all magically know that we need to change our Activity Types from Desktop to Folder View, and that this would obviously change the desktop behavior to allow for adding an application icon to the desktop. If we picked random words from the dictionary, and substituted them for "Activity", "Desktop", and "Folder View" it would probably make more since why the new settings should allow an application launcher to be added to the desktop.

What is amazing and randomly wrong is that the default Activity Type called Desktop does NOT allow someone to add an icon to launch an application.

What do you think?

Rahide Warning: Group KDE (K Desktop Environment) does not exist.

2009-12-17T17:51:00.004-05:00

[root@lost ~]# yum groupinstall "KDE (K Desktop Environment)"
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, presto, refresh-packagekit
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
* rawhide: chi-10g-1-mirror.fastsoft.net
* rpmfusion-free-rawhide: lordmorgul.net
* rpmfusion-nonfree-rawhide: lordmorgul.net
Setting up Group Process
Checking for new repos for mirrors
Warning: Group KDE (K Desktop Environment) does not exist.
No packages in any requested group available to install or update
[root@lost ~]#

Huh?

[root@lost ~]# yum grouplist | grep KDE
KDE Software Compilation
KDE Software Development
[root@lost ~]#

Oooook! Apparently now it's called "KDE Software Compilation".

bash: !someActualEvent: event not found

2009-12-16T15:04:00.008-05:00

Don't you hate errors like this?

$ strace -etrace=!futex -p 3181
bash: !futex: event not found

If this happens to you do not worry. Just escape the bang (!) like this:

$ strace -etrace=\!futex -p 3181
Process 3181 attached - interrupt to quit

The strace man page is wrong for bash. Imagine that.

Hope that helps.

I Don't Care Where You've Been

2009-12-01T11:14:00.004-05:00

Here is my current guess at the chords and lyrics for this song. If you find better chords, let me know.

Pastor Mark has a great sermon for you.

2009-11-23T18:34:00.002-05:00

Cannot retrieve metalink for repository: fedora. Please verify its path and try again

2009-11-13T14:32:00.008-05:00

If you get this error, and you were running rawhide, do not worry. Just edit your /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo file (again?) and change it from enabled=1 back to enabled=0. During the recent release of Fedora, yum has re-enabled your fedora.repo that you had previous disabled.

As of this blog post, it was the Fedora 12 release that did this again. The Fedora 11 release did the same thing. And, no, Debian Sid does not do this to you. I have been on Debian Sid for years, and it has never enabled any repos without at least prompting me first.

The folks on #fedora or #fedora-qa will not believe you though. They will taunt you with phrases like, "normal updates for thousands of people are working just fine", or "there are thousands and thousands of people who had their repo files updated, and they continue to get updates". But don't be discouraged by their "talk to the hand" attitude. Just edit your fedora.repo and set enabled back to 0, and move on with your life, and join me ... I am not one of the thousands and thousands of people who have never had a problem with updating a linux box.

You would not be on this page if your search engine had not led you here. I can tell from the referrers to this page. So I know you are just like me, just some idiot who is having problems udating their fedora rawhide box. We are walking together in this way. We are alike. Do not let the folks in the Linux community convince you that you are the only one on earth who has ever had a problem using their distro.

Note: the root cause of the error "Cannot retrieve metalink for repository: fedora. Please verify its path and try again" seems to be some kind of dns issue see this bug report. Again, I did not get this error again after re-disabling the fedora.repo and continued using rawhide.

Don Fransisco

2009-11-10T20:31:00.001-05:00

If you have never heard his songs, start now:
Here is a link to the lyrics and chords. Go learn them.

In Him.

yum install meld

2009-10-06T17:09:00.004-04:00

Click to enlarge and see meld in action. Melding itself.

The Eclipse executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library

2009-09-30T10:31:00.018-04:00

Either your extractor was unable to extract the lib files, or it was unable to give the lib files the correct permissions. Do not worry. Here is the solution to your problem:

1. If you are a real developer just execute the following commands:

$ pwd
/cygdrive/c/galileo/eclipse
$ find plugins/ -name \*.dll
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_1.0.200.v20090519/eclipse_1206.dll
$ chmod 0755 plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_1.0.200.v20090519/eclipse_1206.dll

Now you are done. The problem is fixed.

2. If you have never done development from the command-line, and you have not gone to boot camp to learn the new secrets for Vista this year, or whatever sad, proprietary jail cell you are in, then you will need to use a GUI to find the dll named above somewhere down in the eclipse/plugins directory, and give yourself execute permissions to it, and your problem will be fixed. The shortened, but still long, complicated list of clicks and steps probably goes something like ...

0. Stop crying and feeling sorry for yourself. As a windows user, you are simply a second class citizen, so just buck up and deal with it.
1. find the "eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_1.0.200.v20090519/eclipse_1206.dll" file using the Explorer ...
2. Right-click the file and select Properties.
3. Click on the Security tab.
4. Click Advanced in the lower right.
5. In the Advanced Security Settings window that pops up, click on the Owner tab.
6. Click Edit.
7. Click Other users or groups.
8. Click Advanced in the lower left corner.
9. Click Find Now.
10. Scroll through the results and double-click on your current user account.
11. Click OK to all of the remaining windows except the first Properties window.
12. Select your user account from the list up top and click Edit.
13. Select your user account from the list up top again and then in the pane below, check Full control under Allow, or as much control as you need.
14. You’ll get a security warning, click Yes.
15. On some files that are essential to Windows, you’ll get a “Unable to save permission changes… access is denied” warning and there’s nothing that you can do about it to the best of my knowledge.
16. Consider using something other than Windows. And stop your whining, "This didn't work for my favorite version of Windows XP" ... go to boot camp and learn the secrets for your version, or free yourself from learning new secrets. The chmod command has worked for over 20 years, and that fact is not likely to change tomorrow ... no boot camp secrets required.

Hope that helps.

Lauren's Daisy

2009-09-29T21:34:00.002-04:00

Lana

2009-08-30T16:47:00.002-04:00

Lana is a wondeful lady
Whose battle with cancer has been long
But all through this terrible illness
Her faith in God remains strong

She has always been a dedicated Christian
To follow Christ is the only way she knew
And this faith has given her strength
To survive the trials she is going through

Most of us with an illness like this
would have given up in dispair
we'd quit saying our prayers and tell outselves
Why pray? God just doesn't care

But not Lana. Her faith is strong
God knows that she has run a good race
He will send angels to guide her into his heavenly kingdom
And she will see Jesus face to face

Janet E. Salamone
August 28, 2009

Wade in the Water (remix)

2009-08-27T05:29:00.007-04:00

Finally got around to making a video with a new version of this song on the uke ...* Here are some chords and lyrics I have been using.
* For the previous free mp3 versions of this song with the girls singing along go here.

Enjoy.

My Favorite Things

2009-08-25T02:10:00.009-04:00

* Here are some chords and lyrics I have been using for this song on my little ukulele.

Enjoy.

2009-08-06T13:55:00.004-04:00

Running rawhide, and having a problem updating today?
Symptom:

Error Downloading Packages:
kernel-PAE-2.6.31-0.125.rc5.git2.fc12.i686: failure: Packages/kernel-PAE-2.6.31-0.125.rc5.git2.fc12.i686.rpm from rawhide: (256, 'No more mirrors to try.')

Another symptom:

http://archive.linux.duke.edu/pub/fedora/linux/development/i386/os/Packages/kernel-PAE-2.6.31-0.125.rc5.git2.fc12.i686.rpm: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 200 : http://archive.linux.duke.edu/pub/fedora/linux/development/i386/os/Packages/kernel-PAE-2.6.31-0.125.rc5.git2.fc12.i686.rpm
Trying other mirror.

Do not worry. Just update the python-urlgrabber package: ‘yum upgrade python-urlgrabber’.

Hope that helps.

Friendship Blossoms

2009-07-31T22:01:00.014-04:00

Each feels a need to be alone-and clandestinely hide away,
from the trials of our daily walk-and the nettles of each day.
But there's a need, yet deeper still, a very human element;
a need for love, for warmth and strength, a sharing of content.
God planted those first seeds of love, in the vale of Eden, there ...
I think some seeds lay dormant, 'til he molded friends to share.
That day the seeds awakened, took root, and sprouted high ...
as the friendships blossomed-God looked down through His sky,

As He looked, He whispered soft, "tis good-this blossom fair"
He stooped and picked a friendship flower and blew it on the air.
Like dandelions, they scattered, and where'ere a seed touched down
eventually, a friendship grew, in that garden of renown.
He intends for us to spread the seeds
and send them winging on the breeze ...
to fertile soil in someone's heart ... and to blossom ... He is pleased.
If we took the time each day, with care, to plant a seed ...
imagine all the friendship flowers would blossom and would lead ...
To more seedlings being planted ...
in more hearts, friendship would be;
then hate and greed would vanish, for all eternity.
It truly is a gift from God, to have a friend to share,
the glories of the moments ... as well as all our cares.

by Dot Chadwick (written in 1967)

The Bottom Line

2009-07-29T16:04:00.008-04:00

I'm at the bottom line of all my needs
I'm blowing at the end of my reed
All of my wants have past away
now all I want is LOVE!
Now tell me when I'm in a situation
or a problem bigger than that
I'll turn my ways around
You help me I help you
We all stick together
at the bottom line!

by Kara.

For more of Kara's poems ... visit Kara's Colors

selecting duplicate rows

2009-07-20T10:20:00.005-04:00

Ever wondered how to select only rows that have some duplicate from a field? Well, here is one way that worked pretty well:

select duplicate_column from table_with_duplicates where
(
   select count(a.duplicate_column) from table_with_duplicates a
   where a.duplicate_column = table_with_duplicates.duplicate_column
) > 1
group by duplicate_column

Hope that helps someone.

Baptism and Summer fun ...

2009-07-13T07:18:00.013-04:00

We found a turtle ...What are you talking about?
Under a shroom ...
Grin :-)
Not ashamed.
Snack time ...
Getting ready ...
Baptized ...
Getting ready ...
Baptized ...
On the slide ...
Woah! ... (click to enlarge)

Fedora Rawhide ... cannot login. Symptoms and solution.

2009-07-09T11:04:00.007-04:00

Here is what was happening, and how I fixed it. First of all, I had to reboot into "linux single" just so that I could get to root and read the log files. If you do not know what "linux single" is, email me, and I'll let you know.

Anyway, whenever I tried to login using the normal gdm interface, these messages appeared in /var/log/secure:

Jul 9 09:03:10 lost pam: gdm-fingerprint[930]: PAM unable to dlopen(/lib/security/pam_fprintd.so): /lib/security/pam_fprintd.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Jul 9 09:03:10 lost pam: gdm-fingerprint[930]: PAM adding faulty module: /lib/security/pam_fprintd.so
Jul 9 09:03:21 lost pam: gdm-password[991]: gkr-pam: couldn't run gnome-keyring-daemon: Permission denied
Jul 9 09:03:21 lost pam: gdm-password[929]: gkr-pam: gnome-keyring-daemon didn't start properly properly
Jul 9 09:03:21 lost pam: gdm-password[929]: pam_unix(gdm-password:session): session opened for user geek by (uid=0)
Jul 9 09:03:22 lost pam: gdm-password[929]: pam_unix(gdm-password:session): session closed for user geek

Then when I tried to login using the console, these messages appeared in /var/log/secure:

Jul 9 09:03:30 lost login: PAM unable to dlopen(/lib/security/pam_fprintd.so): /lib/security/pam_fprintd.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Jul 9 09:03:30 lost login: PAM adding faulty module: /lib/security/pam_fprintd.so
Jul 9 09:03:34 lost login: pam_unix(login:session): session opened for user root by LOGIN(uid=0)
Jul 9 09:03:34 lost login: ROOT LOGIN ON tty2
Jul 9 09:03:34 lost login: pam_unix(login:session): session closed for user root

Well this made sense after seeing the following:

[root@lost ~]# ls -l /lib/security/pam_fprintd.so
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 20 2009-07-09 10:59 /lib/security/pam_fprintd.so -> pam_fprintd.so.0.0.0
[root@lost ~]# ls -l /lib/security/pam_fprintd.so.0.0.0
ls: cannot access /lib/security/pam_fprintd.so.0.0.0: No such file or directory

I'm not sure why the package called fprintd-pam.i586 installs a file that links to "No such file or directory". But removing fprintd-pam.i586 and gdm-fingerprint did not help.

The quickest solution for this issue was to disable selinux. Surely there is a better solution. If you know what that is, let us know.

Fedora 11: yum hangs on 'Setting up Package Sacks'

2009-06-04T16:54:00.052-04:00

NOTE: this post was originally written after seeing this problem in rawhide. The problem persisted into Fedora 11, but all the notes below are for a rawhide configuration. The fix below works for the fedora.repo also.

If you are trying Fedora 11 and yum hangs showing the following output:

# yum -v update
Config time: 0.045
Yum Version: 3.2.22
Setting up Package Sacks
_

Do not fear. There are (at least) two reasons why you can see this issue. First, the problem may just be an intersection between your proxy's configuration and the default yum configuration. If you are behind a proxy, just edit the file /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-rawhide.repo and change the default "mirrorlist" entry to use http instead of https as follows:

mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=rawhide&arch=i386
enabled=1

Of course, you will need to leave the "arch" as x86_64 if you are installing on a 64bit machine. The default https that fedora has chosen will not work with many "transparent" proxy setups, so just change it to http, and you should be fine.

Note, all this assumes that you set up your proxy as follows:

# export http_proxy=http://my-semi-xparent-proxy.com:8080

And when you do run a yum update, run it like this:

yum -v --enablerepo=rawhide update

Alternatively you can edit the /etc/yum.conf file and add a line like this

proxy=http://my_proxy.com:port/

Which brings us to the second easy way to get yourself stuck staring at 'Setting up Package Sacks'. This came up when folks were updating Fedora 11 - preview ... that is, do not run it simply as "yum update" like I did, because it will look as though it does the update just fine, but it will break yum. Doing a simple "yum update" without enabling rawhide will enable the base fedora.repo and the fedora-updates.repo, which will also cause yum to hang at 'Setting up Package Sacks' again with the new "https" in the newly updated "fedora.repo".

Then again, you may enjoy having some extra time while you stare at yum hanging at 'Setting up Package Sacks' until it times out, I sure did ... it gave me enough time to write the following rant.

Remember ... this was the Fedora 11 preview, so you do not want to enable the normal repositories. This is a "feature bug" in my opinion. Doing an update should not change my enabled repositories without prompting me first. I say this is a bug because I have used Debian (sid) for years, and I have been using Redhat/Fedora for just as long, but I have never had this problem with Debian. Flame away.

Hope that helps.

UPDATE: Although this blog entry was for "Fedora 11 - preview" the solutions suggested here, as the anonymous comment below suggests, may also apply to Fedora 11 which has now been released.

Mother's day

2009-05-31T15:25:00.004-04:00

Flowers from the kids
Asleep in the hammock
Mom with mom

All I Need Is God

2009-05-01T21:15:00.003-04:00

Looks like my blue skies fade to gray
Looks like my pasture's gone away, but
I still don't need your golden cherubim

All I need is God
All I need is God
In the beginning
All I need is God
To survive
All I need is God
To help me all I need

By Kara

Error: 'CREATE VIEW' must be the first statement in a query batch

2009-04-30T13:17:00.020-04:00

Have you ever gotten this error?

Error: 'CREATE VIEW' must be the first statement in a query batch.
SQLState: S0001
ErrorCode: 111

or maybe

Error: 'CREATE TRIGGER' must be the first statement in a query batch.

Well, do not worry. Here is how you can solve this issue: Just wrap your query with exec(''). For example, lets say your view is defined as

CREATE VIEW theView AS
   SELECT  tableA.id + '_' tableA.name AS ID_NAME,
      tableB.* FROM tableA a
   INNER JOIN tableB b ON a.a_id = b.b_Id

Well then just change your call as follows:

exec('CREATE VIEW theView AS
   SELECT  tableA.id + ''_'' tableA.name AS ID_NAME,
      tableB.* FROM tableA a
   INNER JOIN tableB b ON a.a_id = b.b_Id')

Notice that single quotes origninally in my CREATE statement are escaped as two consecutive single quotes after it is wrapped in the call to exec('').

You will get the error above, as I did, when executing the CREATE from within SQuirreL SQL, so apparently SQuirreL is attempting to do some 'innocent' things before the CREATE statement. Wrapping the CREATE in an exec forces SQuirreL to put the CREATE statement first in a separate execution plan.

Hope that helps you.

Fall Leaves

2009-04-26T21:25:00.002-04:00

See those fall leaves falling from those fall trees? See the leaves falling? They are yellow, green, purple, and brown. Don't frown. Turn your frown upside down. Don't be a clown, 'cuz if your singing, you'll be slinging your love. See the fall leaves falling? Are you stalling? I think not, 'cuz it's getting alot better than I thought. Good night!

by Kara Singleton

Bubbles and smiles ...

2009-04-26T15:47:00.009-04:00

Friends
Fruits
Up close
Exercise much?
Lounging
Sisters
Pucker
Bubbles
Giggles and smiles

Beach time ...

2009-04-18T08:32:00.009-04:00

First, some watermelon ...
What is that?
Let's go to the beach!
Ooooo - kay ...
Are we there yet?
We are here!
Big sisters ...
Sea shells ...
Sunsets ...
Yay!

deploying with sftp or scp using ant ... Could not load a dependent class com/jcraft/jsch/UserInfo

2009-04-17T08:58:00.045-04:00

Have you ever gotten this error?

Could not load a dependent class com/jcraft/jsch/UserInfo

You are not alone.

You will find a page here that is supposed to help you, but well, let's just say that technical people have a problem communicating sometimes. This problem can also occur if you are trying to run an ant task from within Eclipse that tries to scp or sftp some files.

So below, I will show you how I solved this problem by downloading the Java Secure Channel jar from here, and putting that jar in the $ANT_HOME/lib directory. For the solution to this same problem from within Eclipse, see the section below entitled Solving the problem for Eclipse.

The error and the solution:

The following box shows the build.xml file used, then the ant command line used to reproduce the error, which is immediately followed by the commands needed to solve the issue, and then the successful sftp of files to a machine called, "remoteBox".

$ cat build.xml
<project name="Life" basedir=".">
   <target name="deploy">
      <scp todir="${user}:${pass}@remoteBox.com:." sftp="true" >
         <fileset dir=".">
            <include name="**/foo.*"/>
         </fileset>
      </scp>
   </target>
</project>

$ ant -Duser=geek -Dpass=g33k deploy
Buildfile: build.xml

deploy:

BUILD FAILED
build.xml:4: Problem: failed to create task or type scp
Cause: Could not load a dependent class com/jcraft/jsch/UserInfo
       It is not enough to have Ant's optional JARs
       you need the JAR files that the optional tasks depend upon.
       Ant's optional task dependencies are listed in the manual.
Action: Determine what extra JAR files are needed, and place them in one of:
        -$ANT_HOME\lib
        -$HOME\.ant\lib
        -a directory added on the command line with the -lib argument

Do not panic, this is a common problem.
The commonest cause is a missing JAR.

This is not a bug; it is a configuration problem


Total time: 0 seconds

$ cp jsch-0.1.41.jar $ANT_HOME/lib/.

$ ant -Duser=geek -Dpass=g33k deploy
Buildfile: build.xml

deploy:
      [scp] Connecting to remoteBox.com:22
      [scp] done.

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 2 seconds

So, the procedure above shows:
1. the ant build target I used with the scp task
2. the failure that will occur without the use of the Java Secure Channel jar
3. copying the jar to your $ANT_HOME/lib directory
4. the successful transfer of files using sftp

This has been tested with ant 1.6.5 and 1.7.1, although you will get the following error if you use sftp="true" with ant 1.6.5:

$ ant -Duser=geek -Dpass=g33k deploy
Buildfile: build.xml

deploy:

BUILD FAILED
build.xml:4: The  type doesn't support the "sftp" attribute.

Total time: 0 seconds

If you simply remove the sftp="true" attribute from the scp task, then the file tranfer works fine under ant 1.6.5 using the build target as shown above.

Solving the problem for Eclipse

Depending on your version of Eclipse, the exact menu option may vary, but it goes something like this in the Galileo version of Eclipse: Go to Window > Preferences > Ant > Runtime > Classpath (tab), select “Ant Home Entries (default)” and click “Add External JARs…”, then add the Java Secure Channel jar from above Then click Apply and Ok. Now Eclipse should be able to run ant tasks which scp or sftp files as noted above.

Hope that helps.

Going to the park ...

2009-04-06T00:01:00.003-04:00

Here's looking at you, kid ...On the slide.On the swingIn Him.

Someone's Birthday ...

2009-04-01T23:11:00.010-04:00

.
In the trees again

And again

It looks so high
Tickle giggles

The day of the cross ?

2009-03-27T03:46:00.014-04:00

You can download Celestia and see what happened on that day for yourself with this handy little celestia script I wrote this evening. Just save the script to your desktop, launch celestia, and click File, Open Script, and select the file you downloaded.

Enjoy.

Hebruby ...

2009-03-25T20:56:00.018-04:00

Ok, on the very first day that I was keen to try Hebruby
... today ... 2009-3-25 ... it's broken.

$ cat foo.rb
require 'rubygems'
require 'hebruby'

# the 24th
@day = Date.new(2009, 3, 24)
@hb = Hebruby::HebrewDate.new(@day)
puts @day.to_s + " = " + @hb.heb_date

# the 26th
@day = Date.new(2009, 3, 26)
@hb = Hebruby::HebrewDate.new(@day)
puts @day.to_s + " = " + @hb.heb_date

# the 25th ???
@day = Date.new(2009, 3, 25)
@hb = Hebruby::HebrewDate.new(@day)
puts @day.to_s + " = " + @hb.heb_date

Seems simple enough, right? I mean Hebruby is in the current list of gems today, and it's not like we change the calendaring system everyday.

# gem list Hebruby --details --remote

Hebruby (1.2.1)
Author: Ron Evans
Homepage: http://www.deadprogrammersociety.com

Hebruby is a Ruby library to convert julian dates to hebrew dates,
and vice-versa.

You cant make this stuff up.

$ ruby foo.rb
2009-03-24 = כ"ז באדר התשס"ט
2009-03-26 = א' בניסן התשס"ט
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/Hebruby-1.2.1/lib/hebruby.rb:101:in `heb_date': undefined method `+' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)
from foo.rb:17
$

I guess there is no word in Hebrew for "coincidence"?

Direct3D9 is not available without opengl ... EVE Online ... and other games

2009-03-22T17:05:00.034-04:00

I was using fedora 9 and attempting to install EVE Online, and was unable to get past the splash screen after an otherwise successful install using wine-1.1.17. I was getting the following errors:

$ wine eve.exe
err:ole:CoGetClassObject class {9a5ea990-3034-4d6f-9128-01f3c61022bc} not
registered
err:ole:CoGetClassObject no class object
{9a5ea990-3034-4d6f-9128-01f3c61022bc} could be created for context 0x1
fixme:heap:HeapSetInformation 0x8d0000 0 0x33fc70 4
err:d3d:WineD3D_CreateFakeGLContext Can't find a suitable iPixelFormat
err:d3d:InitAdapters Failed to get a gl context for default adapter
err:d3d:WineDirect3DCreate Direct3D9 is not available without opengl

This was kind of confusing because opengl was working just fine with my nVidia drivers on the machine as follows:

$ glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: Yes

Well, here are the basic commands and steps i used to correct the problem and start playing EVE Online:

1. rm -rf ~/.wine
2. remove the following packages that do NOT work for EVE Online
3. installed the following packages so that wine would work better. Obviously not all of those packages are necessary to get wine to compile, but that's what the following step's page suggested we install in order to get a clean wine compile on 64bit fedora 9.
4. recompiled wine-1.1.17 with this procedure
5. wine winecfg (and set the audio to the ALSA that it defaulted to).
6. sh winetricks corefonts
7. wine EVE_Premium_Setup_84609_m.exe (installing EVE)

And now everything is working as you can see from the screenshot of me undocking from a station above (click to enlarge :-).

The main things I was apparently missing were the following packages before installing wine:

kmod-nvidia-beta.x86_64 180.11.02-1.fc9.2 installed
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-beta-libs.i386 180.11.02-2.fc9 installed
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-beta.x86_64 180.11.02-2.fc9 installed

I was using these which did NOT work:

kmod-nvidia.x86_64 173.14.15-1.fc9.11 installed
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.x86_64 173.14.15-2.fc9 installed
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia.x86_64 173.14.15-2.fc9 installed

So basically, use version 180 of the nvidia drivers, instead of the more common 173. Here is some more info about what I'm running here:

# uname -r
2.6.27.19-78.2.30.fc9.x86_64
# lspci | grep nV
01:00.0 VGA controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 8500 GT (rev a1)
# wine --version
wine-1.1.17

Hope that helps someone.

UPDATE: the next patch installed just fine using the command:

wine evepremiumpatch84609-85476_m.exe

UPDATE: the next patch also installed just fine using the command:

wine evepremiumpatch85476-86756_m.exe

UPDATE: the next patch also installed fine using the command:

$ wine evepremiumpatch86756-88737_m.exe

UPDATE: the next patch also installed fine using the command:

$ wine evepremiumpatch88737-88974_m.exe

UPDATE: the next patch also installed fine as follows:

$ wine evepremiumpatch88974-89883_m.exe
fixme:shell:SHAutoComplete SHAutoComplete stub
fixme:exec:SHELL_execute flags ignored: 0x00000180
fixme:advapi:CheckTokenMembership ((nil) 0x13b920 0x33fb44) stub!
fixme:reg:GetNativeSystemInfo (0x33fb38) using GetSystemInfo()
fixme:mscoree:GetCORVersion (0x33f730, 600, 0x33f71c): semi-stub!
err:setupapi:do_file_copyW Unsupported style(s) 0x144
$

Hanging from trees ...

2009-03-20T20:14:00.006-04:00

grep using octal patterns and avoid grep: Invalid back reference

2009-03-18T17:17:00.019-04:00

Have you ever had a line in a file like this?

This line is fine
This line has Â nasty character in it
This line is fine

And then after you read the man page for grep you may have tried this to grep these characters and gotten an error:

$ grep '\240' foo
grep: Invalid back reference

Well, try this instead:

$ grep $'\240' foo
This line has nasty character in it

Hope that helps.

P.S. Here is a way to use octal dump (od) to figure out the octal value of the nasty character you are trying to match ... in this case it's the "240":

$ grep nasty foo | od -c
0000000 T h i s l i n e h a s 240 n
0000020 a s t y c h a r a c t e r i
0000040 n i t . \n
0000046

A Mighty Fortress is our God.

2009-03-14T17:01:00.009-04:00

It's not in one of the proper languages like number seven is here ... a worthy attempt at praise, I must say, but this has always been my favorite rendition of this classic.

It's amazing how much power can come from only five voices praising the Lord.

Here is a div or picture slider

2009-03-13T18:07:00.027-04:00

Here is a snapshot of a jquery slider I just did for a special olympics site.
(Click to see the demo)I have not tested it in internet exploder yet. It can slide pictures, or in this case divs containing pictures. You may find something hidden there ... let us know if you do :-)

Enjoy.

UPDATE: The code has been improved now. It only requires nested divs, instead of an unordered list. It also now only requires jquery itself. Hope that helps.

If you make any improvements, just email me and let me know.

Climbing trees, feeding birds, and smiling

2009-03-12T14:03:00.006-04:00

(Click to enlarge)

Praise the Lord.

Men are Four

2009-03-06T12:40:00.012-05:00

The father of a good friend of ours made her memorize this ...

1. He who knows not, but thinks he knows, he is a fool - shun him.

2. He who knows not and knows he knows not, he is a child - guide him.

3. He who knows and knows not he knows, he is asleep - awaken him.

4. He who knows and knows he knows, he is wise - follow him.

She recalled this after listening to musings of Ed Burns on the writing of his book, Secrets of the Rockstar Programmers. She noted the similarity to the five orders of ignorance, described in the book.

Chúa Jê-sus Yêu Thương Hết Thảy Hài Nhi - Jesus Loves the Little Children

2009-02-13T04:02:00.012-05:00

Three versions of the song ...

1. Chúa Jê-sus Yêu Thương Hết Thảy Hài Nhi
2. Jesus Loves the Little Children
3. Chúa Cứu Thế Jê-sus Thập Tự Nhân

* Missionary version pre 1975 ... Yay!
* kiểu hát theo giáo sĩ trước năm 1975 .. vui!

A link to some lyrics and chords I'm using.
Direct link to the mp3.

Trong danh Chúa Jê-sus

In the beginning ...

2009-02-12T00:36:00.025-05:00

¹ In the beginning God created the heavens and the eretz. ² Now the eretz was formless and empty. Darkness was on the surface of the deep. God's Spirit was hovering over the surface of the waters. ³ God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. ⁴ God saw the light, and saw that it was good. God divided the light from the darkness. ⁵ God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. There was evening and there was morning, one day.

The lord introduces the concept of a "Day" here, or rather ... He gave the light a name, but the human concept of a day is no where to be found ... yet. This "Day" must be different in God's eyes ... it is used as a proper name. Is that how you normally use the word "Day"?

⁶ God said, "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters." ⁷ God made the expanse, and divided the waters which were under the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse, and it was so. ⁸ God called the expanse sky. There was evening and there was morning, a second day.

Again, another "day" according to God, not according to man.

⁹ God said, "Let the waters under the sky be gathered together to one place, and let the dry land appear," and it was so. ¹⁰ God called the dry land Eretz, and the gathering together of the waters he called Seas. God saw that it was good. ¹¹ God said, "Let the eretz put forth grass, herbs yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit after their kind, with its seed in it, on the eretz," and it was so. ¹² The eretz brought forth grass, herbs yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit, with its seed in it, after their kind: and God saw that it was good. ¹³ There was evening and there was morning, a third day.

OK, now this is the third "day", and not only is man's concept of a day nonexistant, but humans are nowhere to be found.

¹⁴ God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of sky to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years; ¹⁵ and let them be for lights in the expanse of sky to give light on the eretz," and it was so. ¹⁶ God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He also made the stars. ¹⁷ God set them in the expanse of sky to give light to the eretz, ¹⁸ and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. God saw that it was good. ¹⁹ There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.

Still no humans yet, but I've emphasized that the Lord at this point has finally provided the sun and the moon ... for someone to have "signs, and for seasons, and for days and years".

So at this point, with no humans around to interpret these signs, seasons, days, and years ... it may be a while before humans figure out what a "day" means to the Lord. Even now I wonder how seriously people have considered the idea that ...

one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. - 2 Peter 3:8

Just because scientists have a made a few "rigorous" definitions for the word "day", does not mean that the common meaning for the word "day", and the Lord's meaning for the word must to be one and the same meaning as most people assume. Not to mention the fact that still folks cannot agree as to what a day actually is.

What do you think?

A 12 year old trying to save lives ...

2009-02-11T23:51:00.003-05:00

In Him.

Lời Hay Ý Đẹp

2009-02-06T18:59:00.007-05:00

* Một vị Mục Sư kể chuyện rằng, "Chúa không kêu chúng ta đến sự thành công, nhưng Chúa kêu chúng ta đến sự thành tín, thành thật, và thành tâm."
* Nếu chúng ta không hết lòng theo Chúa trong hoàn cãnh khó khăn, thì chúng ta cũng không theo Chúa trong lúc thuận tiện.

Trong danh Giê-su Christ

Installing skype on fedora ... libQtCore.so.1 is needed by skype-2.0.0.72-fc5.i586

2009-02-03T18:07:00.014-05:00

If you use fedora, and if you get errors as follows:

error: Failed dependencies:
libQtCore.so.1 is needed by skype-2.0.0.72-fc5.i586
libQtDBus.so.1 is needed by skype-2.0.0.72-fc5.i586
...
libXss.so.1 is needed by skype-2.0.0.72-fc5.i586

Don't worry you are not alone. And google may not seem to help much.

Well here is a solution I used ... execute the following as root:

# yum install qt-x11.i386
# yum install libXScrnSaver.i386
# yum install libXv.i386
# rpm -ivh skype-2.0.0.72-fc5.i586.rpm

And then skype should be installed. If you use gnome, there will be an icon at f applications->Internet->skype.

One reason why folks run into this issue is because they are running a 64 bit processor and installing skype which was compiled to be run on a 32 bit machine. So the files in the skype-2.0.0.72-fc5.i586.rpm are for a 32 bit operating system. The two yum commands above simply install the corresponding 32 bit libraries needed by skype to run on your 64 bit machine.

Hope that helps.

Ý Hay Hôm Nay

2009-01-31T21:44:00.007-05:00

Người hạnh phúc là do tự mình suy định -- Abraham Lincoln

Nếu bạn yêu việc làm, bạn sẽ không bao giờ có một ngày làm việc khó nhọc suốt cuộc đời bạn -- Thomas Edison

For more lời hay ý đẹp click here ... for Beautiful thoughts in english click here.

Cho Những Người có Quyền Thế

2009-01-28T21:48:00.003-05:00

Vậy, trước hết mọi sự ta dặn rằng, phải khẩn nguyện, cầu xin, kêu van, tạ ơn cho mọi người, cho các vua, cho hết thảy các bậc cầm quyền, để chúng ta được lấy điều nhân đức và thành thật mà ở đời cho bình tịnh yên ổn. Ấy là một sự lành và đẹp mắt Đức Chúa Trời, là Cứu Chúa chúng ta, Ngài muốn cho mọi người được cứu rỗi và hiểu biết lẽ thật. -- Ti-mô-thê 2:1-3

Ôi Đức Chúa Trời quyền năng ... Xin thay đổi, chúng tôi cầu nguyện cho tấm lòng của nhân loại và người cầm quyền, ban bình an cai trị giữa các nước thế gian trên nền tảng của công bình, ngay thẳng và chân lý bởi quyền năng Thánh Linh Chúa; Qua Đấng Cứu Thế mà đã chết trên thập giá và kéo mọi người đến gần là con của Ngài tức là Giê-su Chúa chúng tôi. A-men. (1) -- William Temple

Cha chúng tôi và Chúa tôi, con ngợi khen Ngài bởi sự ban ơn phước lành trên đất nước vượt quá đều chúng tôi xứng đáng nhận. Dầu mình biết không phải hầu hết những gì đúng tại xứ Mỹ này. Từ đáy lòng chúng ta cần tâm linh đạo đức làm mới lại để giúp chúng ta đương đầu với những vấn đề khó xử. Làm chúng tôi nhận thức thấy tội lổi. Giúp chúng tôi trở lại cùng Ngài ăn năn và có đức tin nơi Ngài. Giữ bước chân chúng tôi trên con đường ngay thẳng và bình yên. Hôm nay chúng tôi cầu nguyện cho những người cai trị đất nước. Xin ban cho họ thông sáng trên con đường công chính anh hùng để làm theo ... Đây là lời cầu nguyện trong Thánh Linh. (2) -- Billy Graham

Chúng ta đã lớn mạnh giàu có dường như chưa có nước nào bằng mình. Nhưng mà mình đã quên mất Đức Chúa Trời ... Chìm đắm trong vụ lợi, và tự phụ tự mản vào sự thành công của riêng mình và chẳng cần đến sự cứu chuộc giữ chúng ta trong ơn Ngài, quá kiêu hãnh không cần cầu nguyện với Đức Chúa Trời là Đấng làm ra mình. Bổn phận của chúng ta hạ mình và khiêm nhường ... ăn năn tội lổi về dân tộc mình cầu xin sự nhân từ và tha thứ. (3) -- Abraham Lincoln

Lời chú :
1. Từ "Lời Cầu Nguyện Hoa Bình ở giữa những Quốc Gia" của William Temple xuất bản năm 1941 trong phần phụ thêm "Quyển Sổ Tay về những Lời Cầu Nguyện của Thời Chiến Tranh."
2. Từ lời cầu nguyện của Billy Graham Ngày Lễ Quốc Gia Cầu Nguyện, Tháng 5 năm 2001.
3. Từ lời tuyên bố của Abraham Lincoln định Ngày Lễ Quốc Gia Kiến Ăn, Ngày 30 Tháng 3 năm 1863.

For more lời hay ý đẹp click here ... for Beautiful thoughts in english click here.

mrxvt hanging or not logging in with XWin ... or Can't read lock file /tmp/.X0-lock

2009-01-26T10:50:00.025-05:00

I thought we might get some comments like Jim's. And I'm not sure of what to say about the fonts, but as far as the "hanging" goes, it may be that the mrxvt command is getting executed too soon after the XWin command, and they race to see who starts first, if mrxvt wins the race, then it hangs or does not login.

This compells me to post a short perl script I've written avoid the race:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

# start X
system("XWin -nolock -multiwindow -clipboard -silent-dup-error &");
if ($? == -1) {
   print "failed to execute: $!\n";
} elsif ($? & 127) {
   printf "child died with signal %d, %s coredump\n",
      ($? & 127),  ($? & 128) ? 'with' : 'without';
} else {
   printf "child exited with value %d\n", $? >> 8;
}

# get the Windows process id (not the Cygwin pid)
my $process = "";
my $command = "";

while ($process !~ /\d+/) {
   print "Waiting for WINPID ...\n";
   $command = "ps -el";
   open(PS, "$command 2>&1 |") or die "cant $command: $!";
   my($i, $column);
   my @line = split /\s+/, <PS>;
   for $i ( 0 .. $#line) {
      if ($line[$i] eq "WINPID") {
         $column = (scalar(@line) - $i) * -1;
      }
   }
   while (<PS>) {
      next unless /XWin/;
      @_ = split;
      $process = $_[$column];
      print "WINPID = $process\n";
   }
   close PS or die "bad $command: $! $?";
}

my $xWinSockets = 0;
while ($xWinSockets < 8) {
   sleep 1;
   $xWinSockets = getNumberOfXWinSockets();
   print "NumberOfXWinSockets = $xWinSockets\n";
}
system("mrxvt -sb -sl 1000 -fn fixed -fg green -bg black -g 150x45 --highlightColor green -ls &");

sub getNumberOfXWinSockets {
   my $number = 0;
   $command = "netstat -nao -p TCP";
   open(STATUS, "$command 2>&1 |") or die "cant $command: $!";
   while (<STATUS>) { / ${process}.$/ and do { $number++; } }
   close STATUS or die "bad command: $! $?";
   return $number;
}

This script has helped me to prevent mrxvt from hanging or racing with XWin. Note the magic number 8 near the end. I hate magic numbers! If you know of the "correct" way to fix this whole issue, email me the details.

Make sure your DISPLAY environment variable is set ... maybe "export DISPLAY=:0". I usually put a line something like that in my .bash_profile.

Here is the typical output from the perl script above:

$ x.pl
child exited with value 0
Waiting for WINPID ...
Waiting for WINPID ...
Waiting for WINPID ...
Waiting for WINPID ...
WINPID = 2404
NumberOfXWinSockets = 0
NumberOfXWinSockets = 0
NumberOfXWinSockets = 0
NumberOfXWinSockets = 0
NumberOfXWinSockets = 0
NumberOfXWinSockets = 2
NumberOfXWinSockets = 2
NumberOfXWinSockets = 8
$

Notice how it was "Waiting for WINPID ..." several times ... not good. Anyone have any ideas about how to fix this?

The Star of Bethlehem

2009-01-01T23:57:00.064-05:00

You will make amazing discoveries and find an excellent presentation by professor Frederick Larson here.

By the way, I have personally verified several of his findings using software simulators other than the ones he presents with, as have many other people. For example, if you use Celestia, and would like to see for yourself, try pasting this link into celestia:

cel://Follow/Sol:Earth/-002-09-11T09:53:28.98915?x=5LLYJbN8E2AP&y=W5ATh/lZeAQ&z=J+bqkl6NBVv8/////////w&ow=0.692809&ox=0.083885&oy=-0.715486&oz=0.032531&select=Sol&fov=51.054504&ts=0.524288<d=0&p=0&rf=279567&lm=11&ver=2

What I found, like professor Larson, was that:

1. Starting in September of 3BC, the planet Jupiter has a triple conjunction with the king star, Regulus, signifying the conception of the Messiah

2. Nine months later in June of 2BC there is an amazingly bright conjunction between the mother planet, Venus, and the king planet, Jupiter, signifiying the birth of Yeshua Moshiach

3. And then later on December 25th of that very year (2BC), Jupiter is in full retrograde and so it had stopped over the place where the child was south of Jerusalem as viewed from the temple mount.

The Gospel of Matthew, and other theologians, explain how this news disturbed King Herod and all of Jerusalem, and Herod sent the Magi to Bethlehem to tell him where the child was, and it must have disturbed the people greatly because when the Magi did not return, Herod ordered all of the babies in Bethlehem to be killed.

So, even with my sad little computer sitting here, I have found much more than what I have noted above. And once you've see Dr. Larson unlocking the "celestial poem in the Bible" as he calls it, you will see what I mean. The bible has many more things to say about the stars. And apparently the stars have much more to tell us.

The heavens declare the glory of God; And the expanse shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, And night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their voice has gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. Psalm 19:1-3

Let us know what you find.

Extra Credit Quiz:
Here is something I also found quite interesting after watching professor Larson's video. Again, I am using software that he does not use in his presentation, but I am also finding things that are quite startling.

cel://SyncOrbit/Sol:Earth/0033-04-03T18:16:22.69240?x=WPxnjdUHXKbz/////////w&y=GF9bgqIp7fP//////////w&z=aFHN/DdNlCAK&ow=0.339869&ox=0.551114&oy=-0.720708&oz=0.247675&track=Sol:Earth:Moon&select=Sol:Earth:Moon&fov=16.621897&ts=1.000000<d=0&p=0&rf=279599&lm=11&ver=2

Hint: This bookmark places you about 15 feet in the air above the streets of Jerusalem at an insteresting point in history.

my address

2008-12-19T15:43:00.004-05:00

Tabbed terminal under Cygwin using mrxvt tabs

2008-12-12T16:25:00.038-05:00

mrxvt is a multi-tabbed terminal emulator that does not depend on various toolkits in Gnome or KDE. And even though the download page of the materm wiki says "Cygwin - currently not available" ... You can get mrxvt up and running under Cygwin as follows:

1) Live on the edge and download the latest unstable version of mrxvt from here to the root directory of the c: drive.
2) In a cygwin bash shell do the following:

$ cd c:/
$ tar -zxf mrxvt-0.5.4.tar.gz
$ cd mrxvt-0.5.4
$ ./configure --enable-everything --disable-debug
$ make
$ make install
$ XWin -nolock -multiwindow -clipboard -silent-dup-error &
$ export DISPLAY=yourIpAddress:0
$ # for example: export DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0
$ mrxvt -fn fixed -fg green -bg black -g 150x45 --highlightColor green -ls &

NOTE: Many other packages are required to be installed under cygwin for this procedure above to get mrxvt up and running ... here are a few off the top of my head:

1) Cygwin base install
2) gcc
3) make
4) autoconf
5) automake
6) libiconv
7) the entire X11 category of packages
8) all of the cygwin rxvt packages
9) font-misc-misc

NOTE 1: This procedure has been tested on Windows XP Service Pack 2 and 3, Windows Server 2000 Service Pack 4, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, Vista Enterprise, and Windows 7. Please let us know if you get this working under other conditions.

NOTE 2: You can try switching between tabs by using either SHIFT RIGHT/LEFT ARROW (the KDE default) ... or CTRL PAGE-UP/DOWN (the Gnome terminal default)

NOTE 3: if you get the following error when configuring the mxrvt package:

checking for X... no
configure: error: Mrxvt requires the X Window System libraries and headers.

Then you will need to make sure you installed the "make" package from cygwin.

NOTE 4: There is no bootstrap.sh in the mrxvt-0.5.4.tar.gz download, so it is no longer needed for installation.

NOTE 5: the startxwin.sh is no longer distributed with Cygwin/X ... if you were using that script or a custom script from your /usr/X11R6/bin directory you will need to remove the PATH, XAPPLRESDIR=/, XCMSDB, XKEYSYMDB, and XNLSPATH environment variable declarations at the top, since all of the X11R6 directories are moving around with these latest releases of Cygwin/X packages.

Hope that helps.

Software caused connection abort

2008-12-02T10:07:00.014-05:00

Have you ever gotten an error like this when using ssh?

ssh: connect to host myhost.com port 22: Software caused connection abort

Try removing the entry for myhost.com from your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file.

And then ssh back into the box.

Hope that helps.

NOTE 1: if you use ssh -v (verbose) when this error occurs you may see something like this:
debug1: connect to address myFavoriteIpAddr port 22: Software caused connection abort
NOTE 2: This error occured using: OpenSSH_5.1p1, OpenSSL 0.9.8h 28 May 2008
NOTE 3: If you would like to use a tabbed terminal window try using mrxvt under cygwin

Pre-thanksgiving pictures with lots of pre-thanksgiving

2008-11-25T20:38:00.010-05:00

Click to enlarge ...

Who's in the laundry?

May the Lord bless you and keep you ...

Missing Dependency: libx264.so.58()(64bit) is needed by package cinelerra-2.1-0.18.svn20080514.fc9.kwizart.x86_64

2008-11-20T01:28:00.004-05:00

For those of you fedora users who have gone here and have tried this on your fc9 box:

yum install cinelerra --enablerepo=kwizart

and gotten errors like this:

cinelerra-2.1-0.18.svn20080514.fc9.kwizart.x86_64 from kwizart has depsolving problems
--> Missing Dependency: libx264.so.58()(64bit) is needed by package cinelerra-2.1-0.18.svn20080514.fc9.kwizart.x86_64 (kwizart)
Error: Missing Dependency: libx264.so.58()(64bit) is needed by package cinelerra-2.1-0.18.svn20080514.fc9.kwizart.x86_64 (kwizart)

You may want to try what I did ... at your own risk :-)

yum install cinelerra-cv --enablerepo=kwizart-rawhide --enablerepo=rawhide --enablerepo=rpmfusion-free-rawhide

This worked for me.

By the way "-cv" means it is the community version.

Hope that helps.

Before the holidaze ...

2008-11-19T20:55:00.009-05:00

.
Three pictures of Valarie ... (click to enlarge)

1
2
3
Kara
Shopping
David after his first haircut
Moonpies
Valarie in danger.

The Lord is looking after us.

Someone ... written by Kara

2008-11-08T17:58:00.009-05:00

.

Kara wrote and composed this poem for her teacher, Mrs. Puyau.

Someone near to me
Someone dear to me
Someone who teaches me
Someone who brings peaches to me
Someone who is in my class
Someone who can break through glass
Someone who plays games with me
All day with me

Someone who doesn't like to tie her shoe
and her favorite color is blue
Her father calls her 'Jewels'
She loves to use math tools
Her name starts with a 'P'
She likes you and me

Guess who?
Guess who?
It's Mrs. Puyau,
who doesn't like to tie her shoe

Enjoy.

At Grandma B's ...

2008-11-08T17:25:00.013-05:00

.
Pictures of pictures ... click to enlarge :-)
David in the sun ...

Rocking Valarie ...

Both of them together ...

All of them ...

Valarie smiling ...

David and Val ...

The Girlz!

Look out ... She's going up the stairs!

Praise the Lord.

Taking a nap ...

2008-11-03T20:43:00.015-05:00

.
Somedays I wish I could just do this ...

And she loves sitting in her brother's chair ...

Praise the Lord.

Vietnamese unicode and the BlackBerry

2008-10-30T00:21:00.049-04:00

NOTE: The issue described below was occurring while using BlackBerry OS version 4.0 and 4.1. The newer 5.0 version of the BlackBerry OS does not exhibit these issues.

Apparently the BlackBerry does a good job of rendering decomposed unicode characters into readable characters. But the BlackBerry does not appear to be able to render precomposed characters (which is what most pages on the internet use).

So to make a long story short, if you copy, let's say, some Vietnamese from a web page, and paste it into an email ... that email will not render very well on a BlackBerry.

Well, here is a hack that may help someone out. Decompose the characters, and send those decomposed characters in an email. If you do that, the email will likely render "fine" in a normal email client as well as a BlackBerry email client. I call this a hack because the W3C generally recommends to exchange texts in NFC ... well most BlackBerry email clients will not render all precomposed characters (NFC).

For example, if you are NOT using a windows box, try cutting and pasting the following into an email:

Subject: NFC (like most of the web)

Chúa yêu em lòng em vui thay
Kia Kinh Thánh đã tỏ cho hay
Các con thơ thuộc Jê-sus đây
Chúng yếu nhưng Ngài khỏe mạnh hoài

Jê-sus yêu em lắm
Phải em được Chúa yêu
Jê-sus yêu em lắm
Chính trong lời Chúa dạy nhiều

You'll find that emails sent with these characters render fine in a normal desktop email client, or even a web email client like Gmail, but they do not render correctly in the BlackBerry email client.

Now, try the same with this "decomposed" text:

Subject: NFKD (a decomposed form)

Chúa yêu em lòng em vui thay
Kia Kinh Thánh đã tỏ cho hay
Các con thơ thuộc Jê-sus đây
Chúng yếu nhưng Ngài khỏe mạnh hoài

Jê-sus yêu em lắm
Phải em được Chúa yêu
Jê-sus yêu em lắm
Chính trong lời Chúa dạy nhiều

While the two texts may look similar on this web page, they are different, trust me. And you'll find that these characters render well in Gmail, Outlook, Evolution, but also render well on the BlackBerry.

I'm not sure why I feel like including a small java program I wrote to help folks create emails that render better for the BlackBerry, but here it is:

import java.util.Scanner;
import java.text.Normalizer;
import java.text.Normalizer.Form;

public class d {
   public static void main(String[] args) {
      Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in);
      sc.useDelimiter("Yes, my Java is terrible ...");
      String foo = sc.next();
      CharSequence c = foo.subSequence(0,foo.length());
      Normalizer.Form nf = Normalizer.Form.valueOf("NFKD");
      System.out.println(nf + " Compatability Decomposed:\n" + Normalizer.normalize(c,nf));
   }
}

This program would be used as follows from a command line:

$ cat myFileWithPrecomposedCharacters | java d

So you could paste NFC characters from, say, a Vietnamese web page, into a file, and then run the file through the program to generate NFKD which you can then paste into an email you're sending, and that email should render in a readable way using a desktop email client, a web email client, or a BlackBerry.

I've only tested this methodology with Vietnamese, and because the incident at the tower of Babel was so confusing, all bets are off with other languages.

By the way, it looks to me like neither NFC nor NFKD render correctly in AndroidMail as of today's build, so we should end up seeing complaints about Vietnamese not rendering well on the G1, unless the developers get it fixed soon. Maybe we will have a follow up post with more on that subject.

UPDATE: A great write up on unicode and the BlackBerry is here on the Logicmail website. LogicMail is a J2ME E-Mail client supporting IMAP and POP, and designed to run on RIM BlackBerry handheld devices.

NOTE:

1) For more help with the definitions of the normalization forms mentioned above try here. It is a good document to be familiar with if you are planning to do i18n or l10n.
- i18n stands for internationalization
- l10n stands for localization

2) for those of you who just want a quick overview ...
- These terms are roughly equivalent for this discussion:
   compatibility decomposition (NFKD)
   canonically decomposed characters
   composite unicode
   composite characters
   the "separated" diacritical marks and letters used in Vietnamese without combining

- These terms are also roughly equivalent, and should not be confused with those just above:
   compatibility composition (NFKC)
   NFC - normalization form canonical composition
   precompound unicode
   unicode dựng sẵn
   composed characters
   recomposed characters (by canonical equivalence)
   precomposed characters
   decomposable characters
   pre-composite characters
   ligatures
   the set of completed characters (including all markings)

If you think there is a problem with the terms or equivalencies drawn above, please let's discuss it via email. If there are things that need to be corrected, I am open to that, just let me know.

Android Email application

2008-10-23T02:04:00.043-04:00

First of all ... Android is an amazing platform. So, for those of us who want details about what we are getting before we make that purchase decision ... Let's just take a quick look at one application, the Email application that Google released the source to a couple of days ago.

I compiled AndroidMail and deployed it to the Android emulator, and here are screenshots (click to enlarge them):

Here is the opening screenshot of my gmail inbox showing an email that I just sent to myself using the emulator running the AndroidMail application ...

Here is that same email fully rendered with the subject "Droid Emulator" in the AndroidMail application.

Here is the account setup screen. If you click "Next" with the information given, it sets up a Gmail inbox flawlessly. If you click on "Manual Setup" you get the screenshot below ...

It supports IMAP, Yay! Although, it does not appear to support IMAP idle ... yet.

Here we are prompted for the type of security and port numbers and such for incoming mail on the account ... I just clicked next, even though the information did not look correct yet ...

Here is what happened when I clicked on the "Next" button with my gmail address given in the previous screen ... I thought gmail supported IMAP already. Actually I know it does, because I access my gmail using another email app for the black berry called LogicMail. LogicMail supports IMAP, and can access my gmail via IMAP just fine.

It says ...

Sorry! The application Email (process com.android.email) has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again.

If you can't tell why I'm showing an error screen here, well ... you can learn quite a bit about an application by how it handles errors. And AndroidMail has nerd-love error screens. Yes, we are strange ... we have to see how it responds to failure. And that may explain our social problems too.

Anyway, it is great to see a phone running Linux AND a clean Java app. Overall ... Good job, Android team!

NOTES:

1) mydroid took 32 minutes to build on this Intel Core2 Duo 3GHz fc8 box.

2) Yes, the Android SDK, and eclipse ADT work great on Fedora ... let me know if you'd like a rundown on the packages needed to get the Android SDK, and/or the entire Android platform building and working on your Fedora box.

3) Screenshots made with Android Emulator, imglib, and the (super)+drawbox capture functionality provided by compiz-fusion.x86_64

4) UPDATE: I have found that I have to run the eclipse ADT (ganymede) with at least a 1.5GB virtual machine (./eclipse -vmargs -Xms512m -Xmx1536m) in order to get Android Email to completely build and run in the emulator from Eclipse ... otherwise I get errors like "Could not find AndroidMail.apk!" ... this is because the builds were not completing (because of out of memory issues) and not producing the AndroidMail.apk file

Sweet peas

2008-10-01T00:00:00.013-04:00

Here we go ...

What's in the box?

Just get on with it!

Sweet Peas ...

Green squeeze

Four sweet peas

For those of you we've missed ... part 3

2008-09-30T23:38:00.011-04:00

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Ok ... on to part 3

Random picture of Val ...

Ask this girl what her new name is today ...

Ask this one to read her new poem to you that she wrote for her teacher

Another random picture of Val ...

Click to enlarge 'cuz David's livin' large.

Enjoy.

Let us know when you're ready ... the next set of pictures is awaiting your comments.

For those of you we've missed ... part 2

2008-09-30T10:37:00.006-04:00

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We will have some more recent pictures later, but here are some that are more important for now ...

Hi, Grandma ...

Looking through the pictures from the birthday party ...

Whose face is that in the mirror at the shine party?

Hi, David.

Hi, Mommy.

Great! A group photo from a while back ... make sure you click on this one to see it full size.

How have you been since we last posted? Just leave a comment below when your ready ... part 3 with new pictures is ready to post.

May the Lord bless you and keep you ...