Planet OCLUG

So you have some DTD files: the main DTD files, model files, and entity files, in a number of folders and sub-folders on Windows XP.

They have extensions as follows:

• dtd
• mod
• ent

Search for something using Windows Explorer, in it’s Search pane. Tell it to search all files and folders. Results? Only from some of the files, not all. Why?

Look at the no-search, no-folders mode of Windows Explorer. It offers to help you view videos, but can’t actually find any to show you. Odd, but related. This is because Windows is aware of a video file type with an extension of “mod”. So it won’t search those files.

Fail.

Let’s try the command line! You can use “find” to search the contents of files, but only in the current folder.

Fail.

Fix it with GetGnuWin32! And use grep to find your stuff.

So I’m playing in Eclipse going through Android development HOWTOs. Yes, I know. Java. Thankfully there’s a scripting layer for Android, but I want to learn it all before I choose a toolset for a particular problem. Besides, Java ain’t all bad, just mostly.

Anywho, I fired up the HelloWorld tutorial, made my project, and very quickly found that Eclipse’s wonderful generated code that was going to save me all this work of typing Java didn’t compile. I got, “main cannot be resolved or is not a field”. Huh? The main it’s referring to is my main.xml file (can’t have too much XML eh Java?) describing the Android UI layout, under res/layouts/main.xml. Invoked through the ubiguitous Android R object. What do you mean it’s not there, you stupid machine??

So I do what any modern programmer does, after swearing at my screen repeatedly, I look up the error in google, and voila, I’m not alone. This post was particularly helpful. Apparently, it’s an Android SDK issue, which Eclipse invokes to create the project. Yo, Google! Get off your butts and fix it! Seems to me that you have time…

If you’re planning on running Oracle VM with Amazon EC2, there are some important limitations you should know about. As part of my work getting the Oracle Linux Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 2 working (yeah that’s a mouthful) I tried using the Oracle-supplied Oracle Linux 6 AMI images that are listed as community AMIs by Amazon: [...]

As announced a few days ago, Oracle’s core database product is now supported on Oracle Linux 6. Coming a full 13 months after Oracle Linux 6′s launch, and 16 months after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, it’s a much anticipated announcement. Update 28-Mar-12: the official certification information has come out on My Oracle Support. So [...]

Finally got the sound working on my laptop, running Mint 12 and Cinnamon.

The fix was to go to the Gnome Alsa Mixer and uncheck “External amplifier”. The “Sound” app on the system bar seemed to allow the same change, but it didn’t seem to stick.

I first tried adding more gStreamer plugins. No effect. There were already some gStream plugins installed, but there are lots and lots of others to distract you!

I have had to fix missing panels before in previous versions of Ubuntu and Xubuntu.

Previously, you deleted .gconf from your home directory.

Now you have to delete .gconfd.

“Now” means Xubuntu 10.10.

I am a little out of date on the family computer in the kitchen.

I have had a real problem with sound on Xubuntu for the last week.

The system says  “Welcome to Xubuntu 9.10″ in the web page reached with “Applications > Help”, and “Update Manager” says “11.04″ is available, so I think this is the system that was originally installed a s 9.10, and upgraded to 10.04 and 10.10.

There was no way for me to get sound out of this system. Many tweaks and such did not help. Windows runs sound fine.

I looked to see if I installed anything recently, and “Synaptic” said I had installed jackd – way back in October. I uninstalled jackd, and now I can output sound. I am able to record from a USB webcam, but Pinyinpro.com won’t use it.

One thing at a time.

Gui is cute, and sometimes productive, but GNU command line saved my sanity today.

Tortoise is a good GUI for using Subversion on Windows. It nicely flags all the files with status symbols on their icons.

Usually.

Sometimes it gets confused when a change is made 2 or more folders deeper, below the one on display. I don’t know whose cache is causing this – Microsoft’s or Tortoise’s, but it’s a minor issue.

It’s been worse since I upgraded to Tortoise 1.7.5. I jumped from 1.6.x to 1.7.5 the other day while writing docs for some tech writers, including how to install Tortoise.

I have several checkouts (OK, working copies) from the same corporate repository, all checked out in C:\svn. (OK, creativity didn’t seem necessary in this case, OK?)

Today the checkout I am most interested in was mostly not displaying its status icons. Yesterday I wasn’t as worried about it. Usually the entire tree was unaccented. Sometimes a folder would light up until I changed something. Then I noticed that all the “.svn” folders were missing, except in the top folder of the tree. Weird. I checked settings on a couple of things to make sure hidden folders were visible. For a while I had a grain of doubt that maybe the .svn folders were really gone.

So I went to the command line. “dir” didn’t see any .svn folders at all. That was because they were “hidden” by a Microsoft flag on them. “dir /ah” showed them, but not any of the other files/folders. Two dir commands required. Painful.

I have GNU Win32 tools installed, which is a port of the regular GNU tools to Windows.

So the answer was “ls -Al”, or “ls -A” for that economical look.

Thanks to all the GNU developers and those who ported and packaged it for Windows. You help me stay sane on the MS platform.

The site to download for Windows is getgnuwin32.sourceforge.net.

So, I’m trying to pass a ! character to a shell command. Should be simple right?

Not so much.

twit --post 'OMG...I'm out of coffee...work stoppage!'
bash: !': event not found

Huh? Oh yeah, in the fine tradition of crappy shells like csh, bash uses ! to re-run commands from the command history. But you’d think that in a single-quoted string it wouldn’t interpret that, it would just pass it into the command I’m running. Nope.

Can I escape it with a backslash? You bet.

$ echo "foobar\!"
foobar\!

K, still not what I wanted.

Simple solution, don’t use bash.

sh twit --post 'OMG...I'm out of coffee...work stoppage!'

Works fine in a POSIX mode.

Am I missing something? Is there a simpler way to get what I want? This blows the 80/20 rule totally.

I decided to look at what blog tools are available in Linux. I want to  use them with my WordPress.com blog, of course, so that is how I tested them.

I have only checked out a couple of tools, but I find them mostly not working very well with WordPress.com. The only one that has worked at all is QTM, so far.

BloGTK

This is the recommended tool for Linux, according to the WordPress site. It won’t install in Oneiric. I expect I could make it work if I fiddled with some settings for apt-get, maybe. But the author is not working on it, so no real desire to try.

gnome-blog

Broken. Intended for Gnome 2. One of the libraries is not compatible with Gnome 3: “python-gnomeapplet”. Maybe there is no concept of applet in Gnome 3?

Drivel

I tried it. Editing a new post worked. There were error messages connecting to WordPress.com. I was not able to post the blog because it could not get permission to write.

QTM

This one was able to post a message, but left the message in the “draft” state on WordPress.com. That may be my fault – there is a “draft/publish” drop down on the app.

Because it was “posted”, it put the file into some sort of archive state, so that the next time I went to edit, I had to fiddle around to be able to see it. Finished editing the post on WordPress.com.

Other options

There is at least one plugin for FireFox for editing blogs. But I was looking for tools for Gnome so I can try out Gnome 3, so I haven’t tried it yet.

I installed Mint on my laptop the other day. Then I installed Cinnamon, which is Mint’s Gnome 3 based interface. I wanted to learn about Gnome 3′s powers, but without all the Gnome 3 hassle.

Installing Mint

I have to get some DVD’s – they want to put a GB in the installer. Fortunately there is a CD version without Office software and without codecs. Somepages indicate there are Windows installers, but I didn’t find one. It would be nice to have one for my work computer.

Installing Cinnamon

Installing Cinnamon was easy. Select Cinnamon in Synaptic and install it. Err, no, not in the list of selected items when I tried to choose at login time. Select cinnamon-session and install that (the notes said to do that). And now I am in Cinnamon.

Actually, I liked “Nate”, Mint’s Gnome 2 interface, a bit better. I liked having the menu as one of the choices when you select the thingy in the top left corner. In Cinnamon, the menu is in the bottom left.

Cinnamon Menu

In the Cinnamon menu, there are three columns. The left column is favorites, with some stuff you can’t get rid of like shutdown and lock screen. When the mouse is over an item, the bottom of the menu block, on the right (as far away from the favorites as possible) is the name and one line description of that application.

It actually makes sense to be on the bottom right, you should soon know what your favorites are, and the right column is the apps of the highlighted category in the middle column.

Faves can be removed using the right click menu. Also, you can right-click on a program to add it to favorites.

Firefox mysterious disappearing menus

By default, the Firefox menu system is missing. It turns out that Ubuntu disappeared it by installing a plugin that moved it to the Unity menu location, which is presumably some Mac-like common menu location.

So I could not use Firefox menus to get at the Addon Manager to kill the creepy addon.

I used a command line parameter to get at it, which I got from some web page I can’t find now. However, you can type “about:addons” in the address bar to get there.

The Guilty Addon is called “Global Menu Bar Integration”, and you can’t uninstall it, you can only disable it.

Broadcom Drivers

My laptop has Broadcom wifi, 4318 style. On all the other Ubuntu versions I have installed, I had to install the right thing, run the right script and then maybe remove the right lines from a config file.

This time, I was able to search in Synaptic for “Broadcom”, and install the package b43-fwcutter, and it worked! Wow!

The Humble Indie Bundle #4 was nice enough to bring Super Meat Boy and a bunch of other great games to Linux. The SMB people however seem to want to punish you for playing on a keyboard and leave you with SPACE as jump, SHIFT as run, and no way to reconfigure the keys.

Here is a little xmodmap script that makes playing on a keyboard much more enjoyable:

keysym x = space
keysym z = Shift_L

Just save this as xmodmap.meat and then run xmodmap -pke > xmodmap.orig to save your original key settings.

Finally, run xmodmap xmodmap.meat before starting the game, and xmodmap xmodmap.orig when you're done.

This release adds the long-requested linear scale feature to Speedometer. You can now also adjust the minimum and maximum values displayed, and switch all units shown to bits per second.

• Speedometer home page
• Download Speedometer 2.8 tarball

The official Debian kernel building tools are a thing of wonder. But, it didn’t do what I wanted, which was to build the exact version of the kernel that I’m running. I guess it is only ever used to build the latest version.

debian bug 649394

Here is the best documentation I found for this task. It refers to this which is also pretty good.

Also, reportbug failed (it was unable to get the list of open bugs for this package from the Bug Tracking System) — I used debian-bug in debian-el package (as noted at the bottom of this page). To actually send the mail, use ctrl-c ctrl-s in the mail buffer (or ctrl-c ctrl-c if you want to send the email and exit emacs).

UPDATE:

Maybe I misunderstood … maybe the -5 is not the patch level I’m aiming for. We shall see.

UPDATE:

No, the -5 is the “ABI” level, and has nothing to do with the Debian patch level. So there was no bug. I was supposed to build with all the patches. Live and learn …

A common scenario in the life of a DBA on a linux server looks something like this: From: Sue-the-sysadamin To:the-dba Date: 2011-10-28 17:54:34 Dear DBA, We will be patching the linux systems this Friday night, October 28th at 21:00. The list of patches is attached. Let us know if there are any conflicts with Oracle. [...]

I have a new disk that uses 4kb sectors. Unfortunately, on the system it's installed in, none of the partitioning tools deal with this automatically, leading to near-guaranteed misalignment and slower performance, or so says the Googled results (JFGI yourself... I'm too lazy to paste the links here). So, here's what I did:

more

LPI Linux Certification in A Nutshell 3rd edition, Adam Haeder, O’Reilly, 2010

This certification may be useful to Linux system admins. Too bad they have left out virtualization, which most job reqs will include. It will appear in a ‘level 3 specialty’. In any case, the book is a good summary of Linux admin tasks. 450 pages.

Hi
It’s game day, and Software Freedom Day, for OCLUG tomorrow, Sat Sep 17.
11 am to probably 3pm.
Room T117 at Algonquin College on Woodroffe – that’s in building T.

BZ Flag server v2.0.x will be provided on the local LAN.
There will be some other games for kids, and mine will be there.
There will be some software demos, at least one for ‘R’.

I set up a VM to present software to a client remotely, but I needed a way to record both the audio in and out so that I could capture both my presentation and the client's questions. In the past I've used some ALSA configuration magic for audio things advanced enough that they don't have a friendly GUI, but since Pulse Audio is the shiny new thing I decided to go that route.

It turns out to be fairly simple. I create a new null sink (think: fake sound card for output) and attach a loopback from the audio out monitor of the "real" sound card and another from the the audio in of the "real" sound card:

pactl load-module module-null-sink sink_name=bothsides
pactl load-module module-loopback latency_msec=5 sink=bothsides \
      source=alsa_output.pci-0000_00_04.0.analog-stereo.monitor
pactl load-module module-loopback latency_msec=5 sink=bothsides

The alsa_output... source comes from running pactl list and copying the device name. The second loopback automatically uses the only alsa_input... source device. Then I can record from the monitor of this null sink with a command like:

pacat --record -d 2 | sox -t raw -r 44100 -s -L -b 16 -c2 - "recording.wav"

The -d 2 option selects the new null sink monitor device I created (the index may be different in your case). Last, you may want to use the pavucontrol program to adjust the levels for the input and output so you don't end up with one sounding much louder than the other in the combined recording.

Here are the slides from my Python talk at OLS this afternoon.