Evolution Systems - Matt's Blog

Ubuntu On Lenovo Thinkpad X201 (Blank Screen Problem)

Matthew Jakeman — 2010-04-26T17:49:01+01:00

Just got myself one of these and had a few problems getting Ubuntu to even boot from a USB stick on it. Although it sounded like everything was going smoothly the screen was blank for some reason.

A quick google about brought up this bug:

Launchpad Bug Report

The solution to the problem is in comment #8 on there. Basically you need to use the following boot option to get the display working correctly

xforcevesa i915.modeset=0
Just stick this in at the bootloader and it should be fine. When Ubuntu is fully installed just put the same line into /etc/default/grub to make the change permanent.

Risizing An Image With PHP

Matthew Jakeman — 2010-04-08T16:32:24+01:00

I came across this PHP class today that is great for resizing images. It is extremely easy to use and quite a small class. The class file can be downloaded here:

SimpleImage.php

A quick example usage to show how simple it is...

   include('SimpleImage.php');
   $image = new SimpleImage();
   $image->load('picture.jpg');
   $image->resize(250,400);
   $image->save('picture2.jpg');

The last time I had to do some image resizing with PHP was a number of years ago and I seem to remember it being a lot more complicated than this.

Thanks to White Hat Web Design for making this little class and making it available.

OpenWRT default blocking of ICMP

Matthew Jakeman — 2010-01-29T19:10:21+01:00

I have been setting up an OpenWRT router at home specifically because I wanted to use it as an end point for a NP++ Source Code between home and the office.

To be able to configure your tunnels IPv4 end point (ie the IP address of the router on your home network) the IP address you are setting needs to be pingable. First this was a bit of a pain as I needed to set up my BT Router so put the Linksys in the DMZ. After messing with that for a bit it was all working.

Despite everything being set up correctly I still wasn't able to ping my home IP. After a bit of digging on the net I discovered that OpenWRT blocks all ICMP traffic by default which is a bit of a pain in the arse really.

Anyway, here is the config change that you need to make to /etc/config/firewall to enable all ICMP traffic through the firewall:

config rule



    option proto ICMP

    option target ACCEPT

NP++ Code On Sourceforge

Matthew Jakeman — 2010-01-21T12:53:45+01:00

I have started up a project on sourceforge to host the np++ code. There are a couple of releases of the module along with the modified version of radvd that is needed. The mapping advertisement daemon is on there as well as the wireshark dissectors.

The project can be found here for anyone that is interested in looking at the code:

NP++ On Sourceforge

All of the code is now hosted on the sourceforge svn server so that is also browsable on there.

Remove Quick Create From All Modules In Sugarcrm

Matthew Jakeman — 2010-01-14T17:38:27+01:00

If you need to remove the Quick Create view from every module as I recently needed to it is quite simple to do. First of all create the following file:

custom/include/MVC/View/views/view.sidequickcreate.php
Then all you need to do is copy the following code in:

class ViewSidequickcreate extends SugarView
{
    function display()
    {
        return '';
    }
}

Go to the admin section and perform a "Quick Repair and Rebuild" and Quick Create should have disappeared from every module.

Ubuntu 9.10 Sound Problems And Script Solution

Matthew Jakeman — 2010-01-04T23:49:14+01:00

I have been having a problem recently with my desktop PC where the sound would work perfectly through the speakers but as soon as I plugged in my headphones the volume decided to gradually fade down over 10 seconds to nothing. After this I would get no sound at all.

This hasn;t really been a big problem until very recently as I have decided to use my headphones a bit more to give my girlfriend a bit of peace and quiet. Obviously the problem needed fixing.

After a bit of messing around I managed to totally disable my sound card by accident. After doing this I stumbled across this nice little script.

This script did a brilliant job for me of detecting my sound card and configuring it perfectly in a matter of seconds with a little bit of user interaction from myself. I would highly recommend this script for anyone that is having sound issues.

SugarCRM - Remove Mass Update From A Built In Module

Matthew Jakeman — 2010-01-02T22:02:05+01:00

This quick post will show you how to remove the mass update field from a built in module in SugarCRM. This will also work for a module that has been deployed but it will not work properly for a module built using module builder. Well, it will work but as soon as you re-deploy the module the changes will be over-written.

For the purpose of this we will use the Opportunities module and assume that it is this that we wish to remove the Mass Update panel from.

The first thing to do is create the file 'view.list.php' in /custom/modules/Opportunities/views/ - If this path does not exist, simply create it and place the file in there.

Once that is done add the following code to the file.

if(!defined('sugarEntry') || !sugarEntry) die('Not A Valid Entry Point');

require_once('include/MVC/View/views/view.list.php');

class OpportunitiesViewList extends ViewList
{
  function listViewProcess()
  {
  $this->lv->showMassupdateFields = false;
  parent::listViewProcess();
  }
}

This will remove the Mass update panel from the module. To adapt the above code for other modules simply change the name of the class from OpportunitiesViewList to ViewList and place it in the appropriate directory.

Resizing Images With Mogrify

Matthew Jakeman — 2009-11-23T11:44:07+01:00

I needed to resize a few images in a directory recently and knew there would be a much more convenient method than opening gimp on each image, resizing etc etc.

A quick google search and I came across the 'mogrify' command. This is part of the ImageMagick suite. This is a nice simple command that allows you to resize images from the CLI.

An example usage would be :

mogrify -resize 640x480 *.jpg
This would resize every .jpg image in the current directory to 640x480. I needed to resize them all to a fixed width and the following code achieves this.

mogrify -resize 640 *.jpg

This will definitely make my life a little easier in the future...

Texmaker High CPU Usage And Slow Typing On Ubuntu 9.04

Matthew Jakeman — 2009-10-29T22:57:50+01:00

I have been using Kile for a while for my LaTeX editing needs but after getting a new netbook (running Ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix), and not wanting to install the KDE libs I decided to switch back to texmaker.

I installed it and loaded up a document to start doing a bit of work in it and the typing was extremely slow. I also noticed that the CPU usage shot up whenever I was typing. I tried the same on my desktop with the same results.

I did a bit of searching and it appears this is a known bug.

The only workaround I can find is to use the following command to run texmaker.

texmaker -graphicssystem raster
This seems to work but isn't ideal. I would quite like to know what actually causes this. Of course there is every possibility that this will be gone in 9.10. I will find out soon when I upgrade but the Ubuntu server traffic is ridiculous today with it being the release day so I think I'll leave it a while before I do any upgrades.

SugarCRM Field Access Control

Matthew Jakeman — 2009-10-27T15:37:43+01:00

I have been playing around with SugarCRM CE recently as part of a project and one of the features we required was to be able to make some fields read only to certain users. This feature is available in the Professional version of SugarCRM but unfortunately not in the Community Edition.

Fortunately I came across this SugarCRM module which did some of what I wanted. Unfortunately however, when a field is set to "Read Only" it disappears totally in the Edit View. Apparently this is a feature of the module but it definitely wasn't what I wanted. I wanted the fields to still appear in the Edit View but be read only.

There were also a few other bits and pieces unfinished in the module such as the type of access that had been selected for a field showing up as the representing integer value in the overview rather than a human readable string.

After quite a steep learning curve editing the templates and adding a logic hook I have managed to get the module doing more or less what I want. I have left the original type of Read Only as it was and added a new type "Read Only In Edit View" which does pretty much what it says on the tin. I have also changed the overview list of fields to display a string showing what type of access has been selected for a field.

I am probably going to keep making tweaks to this module as there are still quite a few tweaks that could be made to make it a bit better I think.

For now my modified version of the module can be downloaded here or here.