I’ve been a ubuntu user since the very first  release. Pretty much every time they did an upgrade to the next version I ended up reinstalling everything. So like always I reinstalled my Ubuntu. But this time is really the last time, if with the next release I have to reinstall I’ll just switch to basic Debian. In the end it just has to work, right?

Maybe it’s also my mistake to add extra repositories to install tools that are not available in default Ubuntu. But I prefer that over installing straight from a .deb file.

Anybody else also having these issues? (I know a friend of mine had to reinstall as well, broken wifi)

What I’ve done so far is adding a couple of video’s and doing picture in picture view of the 2 movies. I can’t rememeber if I could do that using Pitivi or Kino. Another nice feature was the inclusion of a transparant PNG file, I would then put it in the bottom have of the picture and you could add some text underneath a movie (like they do in the news). It gave it a nice touch.

The only minor thing was the exporting of the video. I found it not that clear, on the other hand I’m no video guru so I might have to brush up on that. However I do think that somebody who knows nothing at all about video’s and codecs’ will have a difficult time creating the end result.

Keep you posted on my adventures

Does anybody know how you can do this in Gnome, this would be very handy at the end of every quartor

Before I used the Dell I was using an Acer. I was pretty satisfied but it was already an old machine. One thing I really liked about it was the multi touch scrolling, much like you have with Apple. For those who don’t know. If you are surfing and you have to scroll down. You just put both your fingers on the touchpad and drag them down. The page will scroll. On my Dell this didn’t work however, so I started investigating and after a while I found out that Dell uses a ALPS touchpad. Most other vendors use a synaptic touchpad. It seems the people from ALPS haven’t released any (good) documentation and therefor the Linux hackers can’t enable the multitouch.

This seems to be the first downside of my new Machine. For the rest pretty much everything worked out of the box. Wifi, Compiz, … Even my new usb headset with micro worked out of the box. Only real thing you have to add is the MP3 codecs.

In the ticket he described the application as always creating alerts with the description call count is not a number . He used ie7, you would expect this from ie6 but not from ie7. However off course other users with ie7 didn’t have this issue. After some googling this seemed related to DWR, however we couldn’t really find the cause for the problem. However we did find a workaround for the issue.

We added this small piece of code

<script type=”text/javascript”>
$(document).ready(function(){
function errH(msg){}

dwr.engine.setErrorHandler(errH);
dwr.engine.setWarningHandler(errH);
});
</script>

This might not be the best solution, but after losing quite some time this was the preferred solution

I know this is an old system, but we can’t force them to upgrade, neither can we force them to install a real browser (i.e. firefox) as they don’t have local admin accounts. I checked windows xp with ie6 and this worked without any problems. So I picked up a windows 2000 cd and installed it in a vm. I upgraded the browser to the same version as the customer but couldn’t reproduce the problem.

After some emailing and friendly help from their local IT sysadmins, I could access an identical vm on their local systems. I user our test environment to do some tests changing settings here and there. After a couple of minutes I found out that the problem had to do with the jquery library. So I tried accessing it with the actual URL, maybe there was a security constraint or something but this worked without any problem. Even stranger when I accessed the applicaiton again everything worked perfectly, normally after the login the page would freeze and you had to kill the iexplore process.

After a while I figured it out. To shrink the size of the html we were using the compression options of apache. This shrinked the actual html sometimes with 80%. However we also shrinked all javascript libraries. JQuery default ships with a minimized library. It seems that some internet explorer versions have problems with accessing this file. I imagine that ie6 can’t handle a file that is minimized file and gziped at the same time.

So any one out there experiencing the same problems, you can check if you didn’t run into the same problem as we did.

As we build all our projects with maven, it’s pretty easy to do the build on another system. I always have a version on my laptop, so I also checked out one to my new Ubuntu 9.10 laptop. If I do a mvn clean install -DskipTests on my laptop it takes about 27 seconds. If I do this on my main workstation (that actually is a dual cpu dual core machine) it takes 4 minutes 30 seconds.

Noted that the maven version isn’t the same and that I’m running 64 bit Linux instead of Windows xp 32 bit. This still seems a big difference, but then again every time I access a file the antivirus kicks in and who knows what else.

If I had a big company I would make all my developers work on Linux machines, reducing licensing costs and gaing time

If they were .net developers, well that would make it a bit more difficult but I’ld definitely give it a go. Time is money and loosing 4 minutes for every clean build is way to much. Luckily mvn compile and some ant tasks run much faster.

During Devoxx I followed some JavaFX sessions. It looks promossing, but we’re already waiting for it for quite a while now. If the EU approves the Sun acquisition, Oracle could finally publicly announce their intentions with all the Sun Products. I actually think they will start pushing JavaFX very hard, so hard it will have pretty much the same features as Flex and Silverlight within a couple of months. Probably the release of Java 7 will also be moved forward again. A while ago, I was very sceptic about JavaFX, but I’m allowed to change my opinion, right? I see many benefits for Oracle investing in JavaFX and make it a real competitor for Silverlight.

Or off course they will just kill JavaFX and buy Adobe, who knows. But for me a Java software developer, what frontend should I choose, what language should I invest in? I’ve already done some Flex development and it works really good. But I believe that the power behind Silverlight (Not only Microsoft, but all big component vendors) are giving Silverlight much more momentum. Just look at the number of components available for the platforms.

If Oracle would invest in JavaFX, I imagine they also would start contacting component vendors and ask them to start developing commercial components. As soon as that happens and we get more momentum, more developers will start developing opensource components as well.

I see this as the chicken and the egg problem, so come on EU let Oracle lay its egg so we as a software community know what we should do.

I’m sending 3 int values to the backend. It seems that for a weird reason on windows he converts the var productId = ‘4′ to an int and on Linux he didn’t do this. What happened was that my old method was executed without the new argument (as he couldn’t convert it). I would have actually expected the ap to also do this on windows as the ‘4′ isn’t an int in my eyes.

From now on I will never use overloading with DWR services. As Javascript doesn’t really check the number of arguments supplied for a function, this can do weird things!

You go to the vmware site and download the latest vmware esxi build. Download it somewhere in your home drive. After downloading perform following tasks:

Become root (su - or sudo -s)

mount the iso file. I made a dir /media/isoimage to mount it to:


mkdir /media/isomage/
mount -o loop -t iso9660 ./VMware-VMvisor-Installer-4.0.0-171294.x86_64.iso /media/isoimage/


I made a dir in my root folder to work in, copy the image.tgz file to there.


cd /media/isoimage/
mkdir /root/vmware-esxi-stuff
cp image.tgz /root/vmware-esxi-stuff/


Extract the image file

tar xzpfv image.tgz


Extract the actual file you need


bunzip2 VMware-VMvisor-big-171294-x86_64.dd.bz2


Now connect your usbdisk to your linux computer, make sure you know how it gets connected. I always tail my log files to make sure.


tail -f /var/log/messages


When you connect your usbdisk you will see a lot of entries passing by. You will see something like


Aug 23 12:43:06 bjornmonnens-desktop kernel: [1134680.672567] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] 7818240 512-byte hardware sectors: (4.00 GB/3.72 GiB)


So now you know it is on sdc. Make sure there aren’t any partitions on there or delete everything using fdisk (this might not be necessary, but I did it anyway)


fdisk /dev/sdc
Command (m for help): p

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 5 900 917504 5 Extended
/dev/sdc4 * 1 4 4080 4 FAT16 <32M
/dev/sdc5 5 254 255984 6 FAT16
/dev/sdc6 255 504 255984 6 FAT16


Delete all and write to disk


Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1-8): 1

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.


Ok now everything should be empty, so go ahead and write your dd image to the usbdisk using the following command.


dd if=VMware-VMvisor-big-171294-x86_64.dd of=/dev/sdc


Ok it’s pretty easy, but it might help somebody. And for you windows guys us a bootable linux cd and perform these task instead of installing all kinds of rubbish on your computer.