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.
Sep 05 2009
How to put BibTeX in your WordPress blog
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:
May 09 2009
Optimisation Micro$oft style
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.”
Apr 20 2009
Finally music in Ubuntu 9.04
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.
Oct 18 2008
How to run IDLE on Vista?
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
runas /user:Administrator "msiexec /i <path>\<file>.msi"
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.
Sep 13 2008
A sneak preview of my holiday in Namibia
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.
Sep 03 2008
Google Chrome – first impression
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).
Aug 12 2008
Ubuntu Intrepid Alpha 3 – Part 2
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.
Aug 11 2008
Ubuntu Intrepid Alpha 3
I have just decided to install Intrepid Ibex, the new version of Ubuntu. I am not sure what determined to do that. Probably because I had too much time :)
Given that it is an alpha version, I expected to find lots of bugs. Surprisingly enough, I had very few problems. On the down side there seem to be only a few new features for the desktop version … but I may be wrong and the features are well hidden and will become obvious later.
One of the first things I noticed in Evolution is that I can finally have my Exchange account enabled and the program does not freeze as soon as I try to compose an email. A few months ago, after a security upgrade, I was no longer able to keep my Exchange account enabled when I wanted to compose emails (from any type of account) and I found no workaround. Strangely enough the same version on the same distribution worked perfectly on a different computer. The sad news is that the current composer seems to have some kind of major bug which makes email writing a pain. See the images below:
The composer keeps going from one state to another every time when you press a key regardless whether you compose a plain text email or an HTML one. Being such an obvious bug, I would be surprised if it is not fixed in the next release.
A new feature of Evolution is the move to sqlite database for folder summaries. I did not notice big improvements in the search speed, but I did not have time to test it properly. During the initial migration I had problems due to the fact that I have over 2G of emails. Every time when I started the migration, Evolution allocated more and more memory till it crashed. The only way to complete the migration and access my emails was to move a big chunk of emails from .evolution folder and then after migration put them back. After that everything was fine, as evolution seems to build the missing summaries on fly.
Booting the system does not seem to be free of bugs. At times my computer refuses to start with the current kernel (2.6.26.5), but on the second or third attempt it does. A nice addition at booting time is the fact that now you know for which encrypted disk you have to enter the password. I have two encrypted disks in my computer, each with its own password, and in the past I had to know the order in which I have to enter the passwords. Now a clear message is displayed.
Currently it doesn’t seem to be possible to shut down the computer from Gnome. The only solution I found is to type halt in a terminal. I know that linux machines are well know for their massive uptimes, but removing the restart/halt option does not seem to be a good way to combat global warming (just kidding, there are shutdown and reboot buttons, it just that they don’t work yet).
The hyped new darker theme did not appeal to me at all so I switched back to my customised theme. There seem to be a new set of desktop icons which looks quite nice (but maybe I did not pay attention to them before). The flash plugin seems to bring down my Firefox more rarely, but it may be too early to know for sure. However, the other day I accessed a page with Flash (cannot remember which) and the plugin seemed ridiculously slow.
It’s too early to say whether Ubuntu Intrepid is a step forward, but I have to admit that for an alpha version is surprisingly robust. There are four days to go till the next alpha version is released. Let’s see what that version will bring.
Apr 19 2008
Oxfam – Be Humankind TV advert
Watch the new Oxfam TV advert and believe that you can make a difference, even if it is a tiny one. You could start by purchasing gifts from Oxfam Unwrapped.
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