The guys from Netbeans made available a screencast on how to use the IDE editor in NB6.9 to write Java code. People who use Netbeans on regular basis will be familiar with most of the features presented. However, it mentions some nice features which can increase the speed with which you write code. I found particularly useful the shortcuts presented. I wish they listed them on the page so you do not forget them.
A bit of googling revealed a document which contain a list of shortcuts in Netbeans. The only problem is there is no indication for which version of NetBeans the list is. However, it seems that most of the shortcuts are valid, even thought it may be incomplete.
NetBeans 6.8 has a nice support for Symfony and all the tutorials ask you to set up the Symfony script in Options in order to start using the framework. The options screen is supposed to look like this:
Options screen with Symfony tab
Unfortunately there seems to be a bug and in some cases the Symfony tab does not appear and the screen looks like this
Options screen without symfony tab
I tried to find a solution, but the only one I found is to delete the settings directory (on Linux the directory .netbeans). This solution is not ideal as it means you loose your settings and you will need to reinstall any plugins you had before, but at least solves the problem. Any other suggestions are welcomed.
A very interesting podcast from Java Technology Videos about JDK7. Such a shame the host keeps banging on the table. I though SUN would afford to buy a table cloth.
I recently wanted to add a bibliography to one of my blogs. The bibliography was available in BibTeX format, but I wanted to display both HTML and BibTeX. There is a plugin available, bib2html but I did not want to use it because it produces the page on fly which means that theoretically it processes the BibTeX file everytime (there may be some caching going on, but I prefer not to rely on that). Instead, I decided to use static HTML pages generated using bibtex2html, but you cannot use it directly as the links it produces will not work. Instead, I had to do the following:
In a recent article, BBC announced the beginning of the MS Windows 7 public test. Among the features supposed to be present in this version of Windows is faster shutdown. This is something Microsoft promised many times in the past. This time I believe they will definitely achieve it as they “were able to shave 400 milliseconds off the shutdown time by slightly trimming the WAV file shutdown music.”
A while ago, I upgraded my Ubuntu from 8.10 to 9.04. Everything went smoothly and after the upgrade most of the applications seemed to run fine. One problem which I noticed almost immediately was caused by Amarok which was updated from the beautiful 1.4.x to the disappointing 2.0.
I wasn’t too happy with this change especially because a few months ago I tried an Amarok 2.0 snapshot, but I reversed to 1.4.x quickly because I wasn’t happy with the features it offered. I was even more upset when I noticed that Amarok would not play any of my music. Initially I thought that I do not have the necessary codecs installed, but this should not have been the case because I used to be able to play both mp3 and ogg files in the 1.4.x.. To make the situation even more confusing I was able to play online streams. After a bit of googling, I came across the MP3 support in Amarok 2 entry in the Amarok forum which suggested a few ways of addressing the problem. In my case all I had to do was:
Install phonon-backend-xine package
Start a terminal and run the systemsettings command to get the KDE control center
Go to Multimedia -> Backend and selected Xine as backend
Start Amarok and enjoy my music :)
Probably I should mention that I am using Gnome, not KDE. Maybe Kubuntu installs phonon-backend-xine automatically so this solution may not be useful for you.
For now, I am using Amarok as any other media player, but I hope in the new versions features that were removed in the 2.0 version will appear again.
I have recently started teaching Python. At uni, I force my students to use Linux, but as you may expect most students have laptops with Vista. Today, I had to face one of the first problems of running Python on Vista. One student tried to install Python and she could not run IDLE. After a bit of googling if found out the source of the problem: Python need to be installed for all the users, not only for the current user. Otherwise, IDLE will refuse to start.
There is a hint on one of the Python webpages. It says that if you want to install Python for all users you need to run
Now there are two problems: First, depending on your version of Vista, you may or may not have a user called Administrator. The second problem is that this command does not seem to work even if you replace Administrator with a user name that is in the administrators’ group.
The solution seems to be quite simpler:
Log in as a user who is in the administrators’ group (if you do not know what is that and you are the only user of the computer, then you are probably an administrator and you do not need to worry)
Create a file run.bat somewhere on your computer
Edit the contents of the file and put the following command:
msiexec /i <path-to-python-installer>\python-2.6.msi
(e.g. msiexec /i c:\Users\dinel\Desktop\python-2.6.msi)
Save the file
Right click on the run.bat file and select “Run as administrator”
Install python making sure you install for all users not only for yourself.
Enjoy IDLE :)
This solution seems to work on Vista Home Premium Edition. Please let me know if it also works on other versions of Vista.
Sometimes soon (which can mean anything between a few week and years), I will post photos from my trip to Namibia. Meanwhile a short film taken from a small plane flying over the Namib desert.
Ok, so unless you live on a different planet you have already heard that Google has released their own web browser called Chrome. After all the news stories I heard on the radio (even on BBC World Service), I decided that instead of going to bed like any normal person, I stay up till this stupid hour and try the new browser. As if staying up was not a sacrifice big enough, I also had to boot my computer in Windows Vista, as there is no Linux version yet.
The installation of the program is very easy. You need to go to Google Chrome page and download a small installer (about 400k). After that, the setup program downloads the files necessary for installation, but unfortunately it does not give you any indication how big are these files. Anyhow, they cannot be too big because the whole process took less than one minute (but some transparency would be nice).
In my yesterday’s post I mentioned two annoying bugs. The first one was linked to Evolution. In the end, it proved to be due to gtk and it is already fixed. Don’t you love open source.
The second bug I mentioned was that I cannot reboot or shutdown my computer. In the end it doesn’t seem to be a bug as such. The new Ubuntu seems to use a new system of authorizations which indicates what actions a user can perform including rebooting and shutting down the system. As you may imagine none of the users on my computer was allowed to reboot the system. If you want to find out more go to System/Administration/Authorizations. So this should solve the problem of rebooting the system.
Now it’s time to find out why I cannot access my user directory from a browser even though the userdir module is enabled in apache.
Welcome to my blog. You will find here a random selection of postings about computers, programming, photography and many other things that piss me off.
