Art of Tech

PHP Report Maker | A life saver

2013-03-27T16:58:00.000+05:30

SOURCE: http://www.avidtrader.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/reports.jpg

Recently I was involved in developing a registration site for SLUG (Sri Lankan University Games) 2013 [1] where we wanted to produce several reports at the end.Thanks to Mr. Samudaya Nanayakkara [2], I came across PHP Report Maker 6 [3], a php dynamic web report generator with data sources MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle for the moment. In my case it was with MySQL.

The basic steps would be,

Connect to the database
Create a view
Create a report

It is possible to create several reports with different fields and filters from the same view. Apart from that it is possible to make a table, view as a report as well.

PHP Report Maker supports extended filters, which comes in handy in filtering report data. The filters can be configured simply to result in a complex functionality.

Stuff that didn't work in localhost

I created several extended filters for the reports and I configured them to have 'SELECT-ONE' type, that is the drop down. But in the browser, the drop down was not fed with the distinct values of the relevant field, is was left with only 'Please select'. The issue was not there when I moved the files to the server :-)

Moving reports to the server, pay attention

There are views created in the database server in the process of creating the reports. They need to be formed in the server, a mysql dump and restore would do.

Next is the database info in the server. If they differ from those in your localhost, modify them. They can be found in ewrcfg6.php in phprptinc in your report out put directory.

In my case all the table names were in lower case in the mysql dump of views where as in the saver they were in camel case. Grep and sed can be used to replace them accordingly.

More info

video tutorial : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xcQrKOv2oo
online demo : http://www.hkvstore.com/phpreportmaker/demo.asp

Reference
[1] http://www.slug2013.moraspirit.com/
[2] http://samudayan.blogspot.com/
[3] http://www.hkvstore.com/phpreportmaker/

Mozilla South Asia Inter-Community Meet-up 2013

2013-02-28T18:00:00.001+05:30

SOURCE: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hardfire/8510710320/

First ever Mozilla South Asia Inter-Community Meet-up was held successfully on 23rd and 24th February 2013 in Kathmandu, Nepal.

All most all the participants had landed in Kathmandu by 22nd night. We all had dinner, traditional Nepalese with marvellous traditional dancing at Yak & Yeti Hotel where the meet-up was to be hosted and where accommodation was provided as well.

On the official first day of the meet-up, 23rd, the session kicked off with introducing each other, our role in Mozilla and how we hope to contribute to Mozilla in the year ahead. A SWOT analysis was done on community basis. In the afternoon we all attended the Open Data Day which was a public event organized by the FOSS communities in Nepal. There several small sessions each with a time span of around 15 minutes were carried out on Mozilla as an organization, Firefox OS, Webmaker and Localization. A load of thanks to Gen, Deb, Gautham, Mac and Huda. A few Firefox OS developers phones were available and the participants had the chance to have hands on experience of the Firefox OS. That was the firsts hands on experience of mine as well and that was simply superb. Next we had a discussion with Nepalese FOSS communities on "How to sustain with FOSS". There we discussed about the issues that are faced by the FOSS communities, how to retain the existing contributors, financial sustainability of the projects, how we can adopt from other communities etc. Back at the hotel we discussed the issues faced by Mozilla communities in each country and solutions as suggestions based on the SWOT analysis in the morning session.

On 24th, officially the last day of the meet-up, common issues for the Mozilla communities in each country were identified and categorized. Participants were listed under each category as their interest. A task force for each category was formed and they discussed separately to come up with a road map for the year 2013 so that the common issues raised earlier are addressed properly. I hope that through inter community support and collaboration, we as the Mozilla South Asian community will be able to spread the word and contribute to make Mozilla products better.

It was a wonderful experience, the stay at Nepal and the meet-up. Many thanks to all the participants, Mozilla Nepal community and other supporters for the great hospitality and organization. Special thanks to Suresh and Lumbini FOSS community for the immense support rendered to Danishka and myself during our visit to Lumbini the following day.

Hope to see you all and more in the next meet-up with all the tasks in the road map ticked :-)

More info: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Community/South-Asia/Inter-Community-Meetup-2013

Entering its 3rd year, the latest release : Hanthana Linux 17 (Sithija) is available now!

2012-09-17T19:13:00.000+05:30

Original Post: http://blog.hanthana.org/2012/09/16/entering-its-3rd-year-the-latest-release-hanthana-linux-17-sithija-is-available-now/

Project began with the goals of Introducing and promoting Free and Open Source Software to the masses, especially to those with low technical knowledge, no access to the Internet or under privileged, and has now been deployed in a lot of schools, individuals, private sector offices, public sector institutes and government offices.

Hanthana Linux operating system was officially released on the 19th of September 2009 and by now the the number of copies distributed by the Hanthana Linux Project and individuals has counted up to the thousands. According to the SourceForge website, just one of the repositories that provides the distribution, there’s over 6000 downloads from all over the world. From those, at least 8 countries (excluding Sri Lanka) has downloaded a minimum of 100 copies and at least 96 countries has at least one download.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/hanthana/files/stats/timeline?dates=2009-09-01+to+2012-12-31

This information excludes the local repository, LEARN, which is used by Sri Lankans as well as the Ibiblio repository.

The School Labs project which was inaugurated in 2012 by the Hanthana Linux project has already facilitated labs to 2 schools already and is planned to provide for more schools.

Schools in the Walapane educational zone of the Nuwara Eliya district and in the Kebithigollewa educational zone of the Anuradhapura district are next in this project and you too can join this project in facilitating IT knowledge to underprivileged school children in these areas.

Hanthana Linux is not just another Fedora respin. As a project it facilitates the deployment of Free and Open source Software amongst the everyday PC user as well as the localization of FOSS software,Documentation and provide training workshops as well.

Hanthana Linux is not a commercial product. Its a project for the betterment of the community by the community.

Hanthana Linux 17 (Sithija) is released!

Hanthana Linux 17 (sithija), the latest release of Hanthana was released on the 3rd anniversary of the Hanthana Linux project. In addition to the host of applications, the new release has the official LibreOffice guide provided by the Document Foundation.

Get your copy of Hanthana Linux 17 today!

The Hanthana Linux project takes this moment to give our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who worked for the project as well as everyone who sent the project their best wishes. Thank You.

FUDCon KL 2012 | Count me in

2012-04-26T16:11:00.001+05:30

Help spread the word.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:KualaLumpur_2012

Browse fails to start : FIXED | Sugar 0.96 released

2012-04-25T21:34:00.001+05:30

Latest Browse (based on gtk3) failed to start on fedora 16 and Manuel has a fix. It's a matter of two commit reverts. Find steps and more info at the ticket[1]

Sugar 0.96 is released. Release notes can be found here [2]

[1] http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/3513
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.96/Notes

to-doo: a simple to-do list application

2012-02-25T23:19:00.000+05:30

Source: http://reclaimyourqueendom.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/to-do-list.jpg

to-doo [1] is a simple to-do list application written by me using google app engine [2] and python [3]. I wanted to make it as simple as possible yet serve the purpose. The syntax used is simple, more information are there in the 'help' link of to-doo. The frontend is basic HTML so that almost all the browsers including the browsers in mobile phones will support this. They will load to-doo quickly and will function with low amount of data transferred.

to-doo uses google accounts to authenticate the user. This is a service provided by the API of the google app engine. So the application will not save your google password but your google account nick name as it is used to filter out the relevant tasks.

Give to-doo a try and leave your comments through the link provided in to-doo.

[1] http://to-doo.appspot.com/

[2] http://code.google.com/appengine

[3] http://python.org

./sugar-jhbuild update: 'BundleModule' has no attribute 'parse_from_xml' [solved]

2012-02-16T12:08:00.001+05:30

I was trying to build sugar on my fedora 16 (64 bit) box as instructed here [1]. git clone was successful but ./sugar-jhbuild update failed although I have all the dependencies installed. Following is the strange python error I got,

./sugar-jhbuild update
Cloning upstream jhbuild
Cloning into jhbuild...
remote: Counting objects: 30895, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (8597/8597), done.
remote: Total 30895 (delta 23961), reused 28682 (delta 22191)
Receiving objects: 100% (30895/30895), 6.00 MiB | 118 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (23961/23961), done.
Warning: unknown distro version, automatic fallback to rawhide.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./sugar-jhbuild", line 62, in <module>
sys.exit(main.main(base_dir, sys.argv[1:]))
File "/home/kalpa/sugar-devel/sugar-jhbuild/sjhbuild/main.py", line
111, in main
rc = jhbuild.commands.run(command, config, args, help=lambda:
jhbuild.main.print_help(parser))
File "/home/kalpa/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/jhbuild/commands/__init__.py",
line 123, in run
return cmd.execute(config, args, help)
File "/home/kalpa/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/jhbuild/commands/__init__.py",
line 52, in execute
return self.run(config, options, args, help)
File "/home/kalpa/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/jhbuild/commands/base.py",
line 63, in run
module_set = jhbuild.moduleset.load(config)
File "/home/kalpa/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/jhbuild/moduleset.py",
line 316, in load
ms.modules.update(_parse_module_set(config, uri).modules)
File "/home/kalpa/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/jhbuild/moduleset.py",
line 412, in _parse_module_set
inc_moduleset = _parse_module_set(config, inc_uri)
File "/home/kalpa/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/jhbuild/moduleset.py",
line 427, in _parse_module_set
repositories, default_repo)
File "/home/kalpa/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/jhbuild/modtypes/__init__.py",
line 58, in parse_xml_node
return parser(node, config, uri, repositories, default_repo)
File "/home/kalpa/sugar-devel/sugar-jhbuild/sjhbuild/bundlemodule.py",
line 50, in parse_bundle
instance = BundleModule.parse_from_xml(node, config, uri,
repositories, default_repo)
AttributeError: type object 'BundleModule' has no attribute 'parse_from_xml'

It took me a couple of days to figure the issue. It all went fine after I removed /home/kalpa/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/jhbuild Then all was fine working :-)

In ./sugar-jubuild depscheck there is an warning

Missing packages:
gnome-python2-evince

It can be either ignored or install through
yum install gnome-python2-desktop

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Jhbuild

Being a Fedora Package Maintainer

2011-12-19T21:43:00.001+05:30

Source : http://www.thegeekstuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/rpm-package-management-300x257.png

Recently I was sponsored by Peter Robinson [1] to become a package maintainer for Fedora. The first I packaged were sugar [2] activities. So far I've packaged,

sugar-ruler - a simple collection of measurement tools
sugar-portfolio - a simple tool for generating slide shows from starred Journal entries

Packages I co-maintain;

sugar-abacus - a simple abacus activity for sugar
sugar-jukebox - media player activity for sugar
sugar-labyrinth - a light weight mind-mapping activity
sugar-typing-turtle - a multilingual animated touch typing trainer
sugar-visualmatch - a visual matching game

A list of packages I own and co-maintain [3].

There are couple of review request filed at the moment;

sugar-fractionbounce [4]
sugar-pukllanapac [5]
sugar-bounce [6]
sugar-flip [7]

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pbrobinson

[2] http://www.sugarlabs.org

[3] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/users/packages/callkalpa?acls=owner&acls=approveacls&acls=commit&acls=watchcommits&acls=watchbugzilla

[4] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=749812

[5] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=741494

[6] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=739263

[7] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=768700

Hanthana Linux 15 released !

2011-12-14T23:39:00.001+05:30

Hanthana Linux [1] project released Hanthana Linux 15 which is the 5th consecutive release of the project. Hanthana Linux 15 ships with Gnome 3 and many more features.

Read more about Hanthana Linux 15 release from here [2].

[1] - www.hanthana.org
[2] - http://blog.hanthana.org/2011/12/10/hanthana-linux-15-released/

Features that impress me on F16 + GNOME 3.2

2011-11-04T01:50:00.000+05:30

It's just 5 more days to go for Fedora 16 release which is named "VERNE". Features of F16 states that it will ship with GNOME 3.2. And Release Notes of GNOME 3.2 lists pretty good features that I longed for so long.

When I go through "What's New for Users" on GNOME, it seems that the developers are more concentrated on making the user easier to interact with his/her online data. In other words making the user interact with his/her online data in a more convenient way.

There are couple of new features that I longed for,

"Notifications in the lower-right corner now include a counter. This makes it easier to see how many emails are waiting for you without having to open your email program, or to determine how many messages you have missed in a particular chat."

I really love the chat notification system implemented with GNOME 3 but if we didn't see the notification it disappears after few seconds where it is gone for ever. We have to point the bottom of the screen, click on individual chat and see it there are any new messages which is tedious specially when there are few chats going on. Now it seems better, where I only have to point to the bottom of the screen and it will show me how many new messages are there. I wish that the notification (at least the new number of chat messages) are displayed in the top most bar where it is visible all the time. Moving on, here is the next feature I like the most,

Online Accounts - "Documents, contacts, calendars — They can be stored locally on the computer, but storing this type of information online is becoming increasingly popular. In GNOME 3.2, Online Accounts provides one place to manage these online sources. These online accounts are automatically used by Documents, Contacts, Empathy, Evolution as well as the calendar drop-down."

When somebody ask me "are you free on next Monday (let's say)", I really wished I could click on the drop down calendar on my desktop and look for for the schedule for the day. For the time being, I have to fire up google calendar or gmail and see. Now it's going to be possible, one step less, life a lot more easier.
Apart from that I'll be able to go through my online docs locally the same way I do with my local documents. Hopefully I'll be able to modify them locally and they will be reflected online. Sort of synchronization.

There are some more pretty cool features lined up with GNOME 3.2. It's just 5 more days hopefully and after that I hope to do a fresh install. F16 with GNOME 3.2 and other features like introduction of GRUB 2 will mark a more user friendly and stable release.

There's a lot more to explore. Waiting to see how it goes...

t2u

2010-12-03T00:40:00.001+05:30

It was day before yesterday (01) this idea hit my mind. The basic I wanted to do was to code something. Develop an app, a small one but I wandered with no proper idea. I had two things in mind. One to develop a facebook app and the other a twitter app. Ok so what should the app be about? How it should serve the user? I didn't know. All I wanted to do was to code. That's how it has always worked for me specially when it comes to 1's and 0's stuff. And most of the time it left me with satisfaction and I hope that it will be the case this time also.

Back to the topic. So I wanted to anchor at one side either fb or twitter. I checked my gtalk contact list and found my friend Hiranya online. "Hey I really need to code, this is kinda urgent and do you have any idea on what O should code?" that's all I asked him and surprisingly he replied "ok go and develop a twitter client for mobile". So that just set the anchor. Thanks to Hiranya.

Next I composed a mail, look in the gtalk and fb contact lists for known tweeps who tweet from mobile and send them. Well, I'm not imitating Linus Torvalds :-) So following goes my mail,

Guys & gal,

I'm about to develop (or trying to let's say :-) ) a new twitter
client for mobile. So I want to know your ideas on how it should be.
How it should differ from the existing ones. So please let me know
your valuable comments.

Note: Perhaps this idea will limit only to this mail :-) I try my best
to proceed.

Thanks

I got a bunch of good ideas some I've no idea at all on how to implement them right now. We'll see. So special thanks goes to them. I googled on how to develop a twitter app and got a basic idea. Since this is for mobile I though to use J2ME. Most importantly this is going to be open source :-)

I needed a name for the project. The first came to mind was "twit2u". ok I used it for the project name in Netbeans. Today I googled for "twit2u" and found a twitter account with the very same name. So I changed it to "t2u" and here is the sourceforge project https://sourceforge.net/projects/t2u/ So far I've committed some code there already. The approach is to develop a basic client with basic functionality like tweet, timeline, retweet, dm etc. Then go for the more specific feature requests.

So basically that's it for now. Expect more news on the project in future.

Accepted

2010-10-24T23:22:00.001+05:30

"Accepted", this was the most sought after word for the 24 hours ended at 5:30AM today (24th October 2010). I'm pretty sure that people in the computer laboratories of Department of Electrical Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Faculty of Information Technology of University of Moratuwa and thousands around the globe eagerly looked for this word, "Accepted".

IEEEXtreme 4.0 which is a global programming competition organized by IEEE was held for 24 hours starting from 00:00:00 UTC, 23rd October 2010, it's 5:30AM on 23rd on local time. People can compete in groups not exceeding 3 members a group. They post some questions, real world ones and we have to code to get the answer and submit online.So if the answer is correct, the web interface of the competition software displays the magic word "Accepted", else it display a general error message like "runtime error" upon which yeah with some effort we have to modify the code and resubmit until "Accepted". Then based on some criteria like time took to submit the answer from the time the question released (not quite sure though), they rank us. This is basically the procedure of the competition.

This was my first experience at IEEEXtreme and it was yeah simply magnificent. The group consisted of Pulasthi Mahavithana, Andun Sameera and myself. I'm from the Department of Electrical Engineering and the other two from the Department of Computer Science. Apart from our team there were 36 teams from University of Moratuwa competing for Xtreme 4.0 which is about 3 times greater than the number for Xtreme 3.0 in which one of the teams from the University of Moratuwa became the first in the globe. And at the end of the 24 hours we were ranked 162 among the 970 teams participated from all over the world. yep HAPPY :-)

There were 16 questions which they released with a 6 hours interval, 4 questions each time. Out of the 16 our team managed to submit 9 with that magic word "Accepted". Why I named it the magic word was that as soon as the team members saw it, next was a burst of happiness, +1 status of confidence, a relaxed mentality although limited until we read the next question. There were two questions that we almost finished but not "Accepted" and we couldn't figure out where or what the error was. That's the nature. The submission has to be a complete, partials are not "Accepted". After all it is a COMPETITION. We successfully submitted answers for 7 questions in the first 12 hours and in the final 12 hours we could only submit 2 with "Accepted".

It was a great experience and we hope to do better next time.Special thanks should go to the IEEE Student Branch of University of Moratuwa for organizing such an event, conducting practice sessions in prior, supplying us with food and all that and being with us and encouraging us.

I hope that I'll be able to add more "Accepted" to the next year's blog post :-)

NOTE : While writing the last line I though to count the number of "Accepted"s (not including this one) in the post. Surprise, it summed to 9, exactly the number we submitted successfully. Random, nothing serious. Just thought to state it.

Matrix and SFD

2010-09-18T09:47:00.001+05:30

SOURCE : http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/glmatrix.jpg

It was three or four years back when I first saw this MAGIC at an event organized to celebrate Software Freedom Day at Olcut College, Galle. This MAGIC was to put the glmatrix screensaver as the background of gnome desktop. It was Anuradha Rathnaweera on stage demonstrating the power of linux. I was in the audience still schooling at that time. Science then I want to give it a try, I tried several times and failed.

Last night, a few hours before the SFD 2010 (in local time) I thought to give it a try. With little browsing I was able to do that MAGIC. Here is how to do it,

1) Install xscreensaver
In Fedora
yum install xscreensaver
In Ubuntu
apt-get install xscreensaver

2) Disable show desktop in nautilus
gconftool-2 --set --type b /app/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop false

3) Put glmatrix as background in gnome desktop

/usr/libexec/xscreensaver/glmatrix -root

(the path to glmatrix may depend on the distro, above works fine for Fedora 13)

Enjoy !

Empathy log

2010-08-06T23:14:00.001+05:30

source: http://home-gym-fitness-equipment.co.uk/files/log-book.jpg

This is the second lucky month that the Empathy icon lies on the top gnome-panel of my desktop. Well it is... let's say ok when compared with Pidgin. I love see Empathy developers add the buddy pounce function too. It was after the fresh F13 installation that I tried to give Empathy a try. It was pre-packaged with the the system (formerly it was Pidgin) and most importantly Open Source is all about Choice.

Empathy, as Pidgin does keeps a log of all the conversations we had via Empathy. Yeah, this can be deactivated also. The chat files of Empathy resides in ~/.local/share/Empathy/logs and I found them to be a little messy. They include all the technical data and other stuff and it makes us hard to find the messages. So I though to get it to a more human friendly and readable format and wrote the following python code. This for me works fine, and if there are any bugs, suggestions to improve, please leave a comment.

#!/usr/bin/python2.6
#
# W.H. Kalpa Pathum <callkalpa@gmail.com>
# 6th August, 2010
#
#    empathy_log.py
# This script formats a empathy log file in a more human readable way
# usage : empathy_log <empathy log file>
#

import re
import sys

msg_d = ''

def print_output(message_data):
    global msg_d
    
    # print the conversation date
    if msg_d != message_data[0]:
        msg_d = message_data[0]
        print 'Conversation with', message_data[2], 'on', msg_d

    print '('+ message_data[1]+ ')',  message_data[2], ':',  message_data[3]

def main(filename):
    f = open(filename, 'r')
    # read line by line and extract message details
    lines = f.readlines()

    for line in lines[3:-1]: # except first three lines and last line
        match = re.findall('^<message time=\'(\d+)T([\d:]+)\' [\w\W]+ name=\'([\w\W]+)\' token=[\w\W]+>([\w\W]+)<', line)
        if match:

            for item in match:
                # format msg_d
                d=item[0][:4] + '-' + item[0][4:6] + '-' + item[0][6:]
           
                message_data = [d, item[1], item[2], item[3]]
                print_output(message_data)
       
        # if the pattern is not found, print the modified line
        else:
            print re.sub('<[/message][\w\W]*>', '', line),

    f.close()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main(sys.argv[1])

DOWNLOAD

Dropbox usage made easy in nautilus

2010-06-01T21:32:00.005+05:30

It has been a couple of weeks that I started using Dropbox to get my files synced, to backup actually. The Dropbox client for Fedora works well but still allows only to have a single directory (Dropbox directory) and whatever files or directories you put to the Dropbox directory will get synced.

Say you want to sync a text document that your are working on and the file resides in the Desktop (and Desktop is not your Dropbox directory). So basically what you can do is to move the file to your Dropbox directory and edit it from there. But in Fedora (or any other GNU/Linux distribution), you can have a symbolic link to the file and move the link to the Dropbox directory. In this case your file resides where it want to be (Desktop) and whatever changes you do will get synced due to the symbolic link.

Even this I found difficult when there are so many files to deal with. So I thought to write a nautilus script. Following is the code I wrote,

#!/bin/sh
#
# W.H. Kalpa Pathum <callkalpa@gmail.com>
# 1st June, 2010
#

# Dropbox directory
DROPBOX_DIR="$HOME/Dropbox/"

# creates a temporary file
file_list=$(mktemp)

# writes the URIs of the selected file to the temp file
echo $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_URIS | sed 's/ \//\n/g' > $file_list

# iterete through the file list
for file in $(cat $file_list)
  do
    # extract the last filed from the URI, that is the file name
    filename="$(echo $file | awk -F'/' '{print $NF}' | sed 's/%20/ /g')"
   
    # creates the symbolic link
    ln -s "$(pwd)/$filename" "$DROPBOX_DIR$filename"
   
    # sets the emblem
    gvfs-set-attribute -t stringv "$filename" metadata::emblems default
    done

exit 0

To use this script,

download the file from the link below
open the file in a text editor like gedit
replace $HOME/Dropbox/ with the path to your Dropbox directory
copy the file to ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/
give the file the execute permissions

cd ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts

chmod +x <your file name>

Now you are ready to use this script. In nautilus select the file(s) that you want to sync with Dropbox, right click and select the script from the Scripts sub menu (the script name will be the one that you saved the file with).

Once the symbolic link is created, a new emblem (a green coloured tick) will be added to the file just to notify that the symbolic link is created. But to see this emblem you need to refresh nautilus manually which I couldn't find a way to do it from the script.

So enjoy and make your life easier from this script and please comment any bugs or ideas.

Download the script

OpenOffice.org Translation Marathon 2010 April

2010-04-12T01:23:00.001+05:30

An event, a marathon is scheduled to be held for 27 hours starting on 27th April 2010 at 9pm. The event will bbe held online and the objective is to translate OpenOffice.org help files into Sinhala. We have almost finished translating the user interface of OO.org.

So this is an open invitation for you all. If you love OO.org, willing to contirbute and meet all the pre-requisites, this opportunity is for you. Spend few hours and be proud for years.

Pre-requisites

Sinhala unicode installed Linux/Windows system (how to install)
Ability to type Sinhala in Sinhala unicode (no need to be fluent, all that is needed is the ability)

How to contribute

Subscribe to openoffice-lk mailing list
Drop a mail with the subject "Translation Marathon 2010 April", say that your willing to contribute.

What you have got to do at the event

Type simple Sinhala terms for the English terms provided.
You should only use Sinhala unicode.

You are not alone

There will be a lot for sure.
You can ask others for unknown terms.
You can get to know each other.
You will have fun.

As this event is going to be held you 27 hours you can contribute at any time for any long. We hope to get a considerable percentage of the OO.org Help files translated to Sinhala in this event.

Make use of this significant opportunity you have, contribute to the community project, spend few hours at the event and be your self proud for the life time.

Touchpad in GDM

2010-03-22T22:26:00.001+05:30

GDM is for GNOME Display Manager, the graphical login program in GNOME. I recently (though it's been a couple of years I started using GNOME. Well I actually started using a touch pad recently :-) ) found that mouse tap is not working there. Called google and the was able to solve the prob. Here's what should be done.

Copy the file /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-synaptics.fdi to /etc/hal/fdi/policy/

Open the file and you will find something like

Just below that add the following line

<merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton1" type="string">1</merge>

Save the file.

Now you need to restart hal. You can simply reboot the machine or

Mouse tap should work now.

Airtel GPRS with E-tel P7 in Fedora 11

2009-11-03T02:36:00.006+05:30

Here's how I configured an E-tel P7 phone in Fedora 11 to connect to the internet via GPRS. I was successful with a Sony Ericsson W200i. All I have to do was to create a new mobile broadband connection. But when P7 was connected it was detected as a modem but I couldn't connect to the internet. So I tried with wvdial.

STEP 1:

First check whether wvdial is installed
$whereis wvdial

If it returns something like
wvdial: /usr/bin/wvdial /usr/share/man/man1/wvdial.1.gz

then you have wvdial installed. If not install wvdial
$yum install wvdial (need to be super user)

STEP 2:

Configure wvdial
$wvdialconf

After the configuration /etc/wvdial.conf will be created. Then open this file a text editor and replace the whole text with

[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","airtellive","",0,0
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Stupid Mode = yes
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 460800
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99#
Password = a
Username = a

[Modem0]
Init3 = ATM0
SetVolume = 0
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Dial Command = ATDT
Baud = 460800
FlowControl = NOFLOW
Init1 = ATZ

Try replacing the text in Init 1 as follows for the following service providers

Dialog Postpaid: AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","www.dialogsl.com",,0,0
Dialog Prepaid: AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","ppinternet",,0,0
Mobitel: AT+ CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”mobitel3g”

STEP 3:

Open /etc/resolve.conf from a text editor and append the following line

nameserver 4.2.2.2

STEP 4:

As super user issue
$wvdial

Your done !

Fireup firefox and start surfing, don't forget to clear the tick on "work offline" in ff ;-)

STEP 5:

yeah termination. Press Ctrl+c in the terminal where you issued wvdial

Sources:
http://www.brantel.lk/
http://tuxomaniac.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/airtel-gprs-on-linux-with-nokia-phone/

Acer Aspire 4736z with Fedora 11

2009-09-25T22:33:00.012+05:30

This all about my experience with Acer Aspire 4736z notebook with Fedora 11. F11 installation went smoothly and after the installation many worked well, except the following issues.

Touchpad tap

Touchpad tap don't work by default. The solution is simple. Just go to System -> Preferences -> Mouse, click on touchpad tab and tick Enable mouse clicks with touchpad

Ethernet port

Install Atheros ethernet drivers and it will work.

Headphone jack

The problem is that even when the headphone is connected, sound comes from the notebook speaker instead of from the headphone. The solution is here. And in my case adding options snd-hda-intel model=auto to /etc/modprobe.conf did the trick. If /etc/modprobe.conf does not exist just create a file /etc and save it as modprobe.conf.

Multimedia shortcut keys with Amarok

I use Amarok as my media player and the media shortcut keys don't work with Amarok. There's a Amarok script which solves the problem. Just download it from here and follow the instructions there.

I hope that this will help you and you are welcome to add more tweeks if there are any.

purple-microblog to Gwitter

2009-05-29T07:18:00.003+05:30

Earlier I used purple-microblog, a pugin for pidgin as a twitter client for my desktop. But pidgin had some issues with SCIM so sometimes I couldn't use my native language. Despite that issue, purple-microblog is a cool plugin for pidgin. So I searched for some other twitter clients.

Founds some for linux. Among twitux, mitter were good. But gwibber was the best. GTwitter as most say the best had some issues. Gwibber supports some other protocols also. Only used a day. So far so good :-)

Twitter, Facebook and Pidgin

2009-04-16T19:27:00.004+05:30

Pidgin is one of the most popular IM client in linux as well as in windows. It supports multi protocols and have a lot of plugins.

purple-microblog is a plugin for pidgin which enables you to update your twitter status, display others' status, display replies etc.

For Fedora install purple-microblog as follows
yum install purple-microblog

After installing don't forget to enable Twitgin plugin in pidgin. Go to Tools --> Plugins and enable Twitgin plugin.

Now comes Facebook. In my Facebook account I have installed twitter application which enables you to view twitter updates and update Facebook status as you update twitter.

Just another method to make things easier :-) .

Watch videos in linux terminal

2009-04-12T16:39:00.004+05:30

Ever thought of watching a video in linux terminal ? Give it a try.

mplayer -vo caca <video file>

To have a black and white output

mplayer -vo aa <video file>

Enjoy.........

Online Java Compiler

2009-03-26T11:28:00.003+05:30

http://www.innovation.ch/java/java_compile.html

This is an online java compiler. All you have to do is just upload the java source files and set compiler parameters as you wish, select the JDK version and press "compile". If there are no compilations errors the next page will provide you with a link to download the compiled java (*.class) files.

CDPATH

2009-03-12T08:41:00.007+05:30

CDPATH is an environmental variable in linux which specifies the additional base for cd command. Suppose you frequently cd from /etc, in terminal issue export CDPATH=/etc. Now if you issue cd mail from any location, you will be in /etc/mail (unless there's no such directory named "mail" in your current location.)

To set several bases issue export CDPATH=.:[base 1]:[base 2] etc.

To make this bases permanent add export CDPATH=.:[base 1]:[base 2] to your ~/.bash_profile

Wine matures.....

2009-02-05T20:14:00.002+05:30

I wanted to edit some files in Excel today. As I run Fedora 10 in my PC it was a problem. So I tried wine which allows Windows programmes to run in Linux. I installed MS Office 2003 with wine. No problem at all. Then I tried running MS Excel with wine. WOW. It worked. I did my editings.

As time pass by wine matures....... isn't it ?