Google Web Pages The Adventure

Maplins 60 Watt Solar Kit

2011-04-01T13:04:00.001-07:00

All this talk of nuclear power stations in trouble got me thinking about Solar power so I bought a Maplins 60 Watt Power system and put it in my back garden. Here is a video I made on the setup steps.

Once of the first questions that arises is how much power does it generate? The answer is 60 watts of power stored in a 12 volt device so it's 5 Amp Hours per hour. I purchased a deep cycle battery which has yet to arrive which is 96 Amp Hours. The kit comes with a controller handing 10 Amps and can redirect the current to a bunch of DC connectors. Also there is the option to connect to an Inverter which converts DC to AC with some loss in transformation.

Dell XPS 720 Hangs And PC Freezes Solved!

2011-03-06T07:33:00.000-08:00

Recently, I purchased a refurbished Dell XPS 720 and it was noteworthy for the following problems.

1. The computer would "freeze" inexplicably and have to be rebooted

2. On start up the machine would also occasionally just not start up - typically in the morning

3. It made a strong fan whirring noise on start up.

I pretty much thought it was a hardware problem. I upgraded the video drivers and so on. Nothing worked.

Then the whole machine gave an "amber light" on start up.

Dell came out and it turned out the problem was DUST. There was too much dust on the graphics card and heat sink.

So the morale of this story. If you experience this type of problem. Crack open your box and do some dusting. There are several videos on you tube how to do this safely.

Save cost on iPhone WiFi

2010-10-11T10:27:00.000-07:00

At times, one may be in a WiFi Zone but the phone has not connected to the WiFi. Instead, it will use the data plan of the network provider which can be quite expensive. To disable this on the iPhone 3G, here is what I have done.

Settings > General > Network > Cellular Data Network > Cellular Data > APN

In my case, it was set to 'internet'

I set it to 'foo'

Now in future when you roam on the data plan, you will get a message that it's not enabled and you will use the local WiFi.

Trip to Riga

2010-09-27T14:03:00.000-07:00

We took the Ryan Air flight from Dublin to Riga. A queue formed in the departures lounge and we queued up like everyone else. The flight was delayed an hour so we stood there and waited patiently. We got a seat together and the flight took two and a half hours. Riga is the capital of Latvia and is GMT +2. We stayed in Hotel Garden Palace which sounds like a Chinese Takeaway as my wife joked but we got a really nice suite with a Sauna and a bath for two. It’s situated right beside the Occupation Museum which is a must see location if you’re a traveler who is interested in Soviet and Nazi Germany influence on this region. Since Riga regained its independence and became part of EU, it now is home to approximately twenty five percent former Soviet population. The old town is very pretty and will keep a busy tourist occupied for at least one day, maybe two. Take a small electric train around and it will show you the high lights. The people are reserved and polite and we were never made feel unwelcome. On the Saturday we arrived there was a series of markets and people singing and dancing in traditional costume. The city is not a tourist oriented one but is a real home to the people of Latvia. However, it is a little pricey but I didn’t feel ripped off. The main town can be walked reasonably easily and I did this with my wife. On the edge of the town is the main river which spans the bridge and it is quite a walk to get to the other side and I decided not to do it. Eating out, we tried a place called Taverna near the Powder Tower and sample what was promoted as one hundred percent Latvian food. I tried the local beer and it was pretty strong and woke up with a headache the next day but maybe this was more excess on my part. The food was simple and unfussy. We also tried a place called 1221 which served excellent food which was quite the opposite. There was a European wine list and the food was extremely tasty but the portions might be too small for some. We also had some food in Double Coffee which was sensitively priced and the coffee was excellent. We arrived near the end of September and were lucky to get some nice warm days beating the weather forecast. However, the norm for this time of the year is to be overcast and there can be some rain but it was not freezing. Riga airport is small and well run on the day we were there. It is about twenty minutes from the old town and the taxi fare cost us about nine lats. The current at the time of writing this is approximate to the cost of One Pound Sterling. All in all, it was a fun trip to one of the most north eastern cities served by Ryan Air and which is also a new member of the expanding European Union. The various attractions were also all cheaply priced.

Some images from the trip

Hotel Garden Palace

Restaurant 1221

Riga Town Square

Egyptian bust in the Castle Museum

Quirky Spoons and Forks clock

Riga Duma

Reconstructed Russian Gulag in the Museum of Occupation

Setting up Jira/Confluence within Eclipse running Tomcat 5.5

2009-02-09T07:45:00.000-08:00

Here's how you setup Jira/Confluence within Eclipse running Tomcat 5.5. A problem I ran into was that when the application started up, it complained

No database connection found for helperName "defaultDS"

The instructions on the Website tells one to modify server.xml in the Tomcat config. However this does not work.

So to fix, here's what you need to do...

Create a context.xml inside your Eclipse project META-INF directory.

<Resource name="jdbc/JiraDS"

auth="Container"

type="javax.sql.DataSource"

username="sa"

password=""

driverClassName="org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver"

url="jdbc:hsqldb:${catalina.home}/database/jiradb"

minEvictableIdleTimeMillis="4000"

timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis="5000"

maxActive="20" />

<Resource name="UserTransaction" auth="Container" type="javax.transaction.UserTransaction"

factory="org.objectweb.jotm.UserTransactionFactory" jotm.timeout="60"/>

</Context>

Next, in your web.xml file, add the following lines near the end of the web.xml file within your Eclipse project.

<resource-ref>

<description>DB Connection</description>

<res-ref-name>jdbc/JiraDS</res-ref-name>

<res-type>javax.sql.DataSource</res-type>

<res-auth>Container</res-auth>

</resource-ref>

Restart your project and that should do it! Hope this helps! Enjoy jira/confluence....

Integrating Groovy Script into Your Java Application

2009-01-30T04:15:00.000-08:00

It's possible to integrate the Groovy Script engine into a running Java Engine. There was many reasons you might want to do this. For example, you might want customizations which are script based as opposed to Class based. To integrate this, you must pass the Objects you want from the running Java engine into the GroovyScript engine and then execute the Script code via Java.

import groovy.lang.Binding;

import groovy.lang.GroovyShell;

Binding binding = new Binding();

// bind variables to groovy context

binding.setVariable("myObject",anObjectInstance);

// create groovy shell and add the binding needed

GroovyShell gShell = new GroovyShell(binding);

// execute the groovy script and retrieve the return value

Object returnValue = gShell.evaluate(SomeDataObject.getScriptCode());

if (returnValue instanceof java.lang.Integer) {

result = ((Integer)returnValue).intValue();

getLogger().info("Value is " + result);

}

else

getLogger().info("No value returned.");

You don't have to return a value. You can just set the value of the Groovy Script object passed but I included it as a way to show how this can be done.

The Groovy Script itself is just like Java code and you reference the object passed in which is called myObject e.g. myObject.setValue()... etc;

Deleting A RootKit Virus from A PC

2009-01-02T17:39:00.000-08:00

Recently, I encountered a thorny issue where I had a RootKit virus on my PC. I ran every conceivable Virus checker but each time I started up the PC, it reported that a rogue program was running using svcproc.exe and Windows was trying to shut it down. Basically, the Virus has installed itself onto the winlogon process as a startup program and the .dll I needed to remove was protected. So here's how I fixed the problem. I installed an evaulation copy of UnHackMe. It offers a boot option where you can debug the programs that you load on startup and offers an ability to remove the offending program. In the end, I had to click on the 'look in regedit' option for the program and I deleted it in the boot edit option. This is one way to clear bad programs which attach themselves to your boot sequence.

Unhackme is not free but your can use a fully functional 30 day eval copy.

Run a script remotely via SSH using JSCH and JAVA

2008-12-23T03:33:00.001-08:00

In this article, I'll describe how you can run a script remotely via SSH And JSCH. Lets say you have some data that you have FTP'd over to your server and you want to run a remote script via a Java Program. One way you can do this is to write a Java Program which connects to your SSH session and then executes a remote script, which is already in place. The JSCH library can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/jsch/ and is a free download. Once you have done this, you'll need to write a Java Class to connect to the remote location. Here is the code. Call the exec command with the chosen command and place the appropriate in your properties file.

package com.content.jsc;

import com.jcraft.jsch.*;

import java.awt.*;

import javax.swing.*;

import org.apache.commons.logging.Log;

import org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory;

import java.io.*;

import java.util.Properties;

public class ExecAdmin{

Log log = LogFactory.getLog(ExecAdmin.class);

public ExecAdmin() {

// TODO Auto-generated constructor stub

}

public void exec(String command, Properties p){

try{

JSch jsch=new JSch();

String host=p.getProperty("generator.static.ftp.host");

String user=p.getProperty("generator.static.ftp.username");

String password=p.getProperty("generator.static.ftp.password");

String portnum=p.getProperty("generator.static.ftp.host.portnum");

Integer iPortNum = new Integer(portnum);

Session session=jsch.getSession(user, host, iPortNum.intValue());

// username and password will be given via UserInfo interface.

UserInfo ui=new MyUserInfo(password);

session.setUserInfo(ui);

session.connect();

Channel channel=session.openChannel("exec");

((ChannelExec)channel).setCommand(command);

// X Forwarding

// channel.setXForwarding(true);

//channel.setInputStream(System.in);

channel.setInputStream(null);

//channel.setOutputStream(System.out);

//FileOutputStream fos=new FileOutputStream("/tmp/stderr");

//((ChannelExec)channel).setErrStream(fos);

((ChannelExec)channel).setErrStream(System.err);

InputStream in=channel.getInputStream();

channel.connect();

byte[] tmp=new byte[1024];

while(true){

while(in.available()>0){

int i=in.read(tmp, 0, 1024);

if(i<0)break;

log.debug(new String(tmp, 0, i));

}

if(channel.isClosed()){

log.debug("exit-status: "+channel.getExitStatus());

break;

}

try{Thread.sleep(1000);}catch(Exception ee){ log.debug(ee); }

}

channel.disconnect();

session.disconnect();

}

catch(Exception e){

System.out.println(e);

}

public static class MyUserInfo implements UserInfo{

String password = "";

public MyUserInfo(String password) { this.password = password; }

public String getPassword(){ return password; }

public boolean promptYesNo(String str){return true;}

public String getPassphrase(){ return null; }

public boolean promptPassphrase(String message){ return true; }

public boolean promptPassword(String message){ return true; }

public void showMessage(String message){}

}

Write your own redirect script using Java and velocity templates

2008-11-11T07:25:00.001-08:00

Let's say to have a set of Webpages and you want to move them to a new web location. However, you only have support for Javascript redirects and you want to generate a bunch of files, maybe several hundred, which map one location to the other and you don't want to do it manually. In this example, I'll show you how to do it with Java and Velocity templates. There is the Java Program itself called RedirectAdmin which reads the config file. Once it does this, it generates a file per entry and uses Velocity templates technology to fill in the new url for the redirect template. The Velocity template is a html file with a .vm template extension containing some special Velocity syntax. The Config file just contains lines of text which are comma seperated pairs of from <file_name> and to <new_http_location>. You'll need to go to the Velocity site and download their latest JARS which are free to compile and run successfully. This is a stand-alone app that can be run on the command line or inside an IDE of your choice. It's also a nice example of how to use Velocity Templates outside of a Web Container and can be repurposed for other requirements you may have. Enjoy :-)

The config file redirects.txt. <existing_filename>,<new_url_location>

old_content.html,http://yournewsite.example.com/new_content.html

more_old_content.html,http://yournewsite.example.com/any_file_name_content.html

The Velocity template, redirect.vm

<html>

<head>

<title>Moved to new URL: $newurl</title>

</head>

<body>

<h1>This page has been moved to $newurl</h1>

<p>If your browser doesn't redirect you to the new location please <a href="$newurl"><b>click here</b></a>, sorry for the hassles!</p>

</body>

</html>

The Java Source

package com.redirect;

import java.io.BufferedReader;

import java.io.BufferedWriter;

import java.io.File;

import java.io.FileReader;

import java.io.FileWriter;

import java.io.StringWriter;

import java.io.Writer;

import java.util.ArrayList;

import java.util.HashMap;

import java.util.Properties;

import java.util.StringTokenizer;

import org.apache.commons.logging.Log;

import org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory;

import org.apache.velocity.Template;

import org.apache.velocity.VelocityContext;

import org.apache.velocity.app.VelocityEngine;

import com.content.links.Link;

import com.content.renderer.BaseRenderer;

import com.content.rerieval.RetrieveFromHttp;

import com.content.utils.ContentFormat;

import com.content.utils.FilesHelper;

import com.content.utils.SettingsHelper;

public class RedirectAdmin {

/**

* @param args

public static void main(String[] args) {

// TODO Auto-generated method stub

Log log = LogFactory.getLog(RedirectAdmin.class);

//open redirect file

String defaultLinksFile="";

try {

//Global values

defaultLinksFile = "redirects.txt";

File linksFile = new File(defaultLinksFile);

BufferedReader subTopicInput=null;

subTopicInput = new BufferedReader( new FileReader(linksFile) );

String link = null;

while (( link = subTopicInput.readLine()) != null){

StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(link,",");

String filename = (String) st.nextToken();

String newurl = (String) st.nextToken();

//open velocity template and generate file c:/redirect directory

try {

/* first, get and initialize an engine */

VelocityEngine ve = new VelocityEngine();

Properties p = new Properties();

p.setProperty( "file.resource.loader.path", "C:\\eclipse\\redirect_test\\");

ve.init(p);

/* add that list to a VelocityContext */

VelocityContext context = new VelocityContext();

context.put("newurl", newurl );

Template t = ve.getTemplate( "sample_redirect.vm" );

log.debug("Template retrieved");

/* now render the template into a Writer */

StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();

t.merge( context, writer );

/* create the file */

Writer output = null;

try {

String generatorDir = "c:/redirectsdir_but_can_be_anything_you_choose";

File fGeneratorDir = new File(generatorDir);

if (!fGeneratorDir.exists()) {

fGeneratorDir.mkdirs();

}

String generatorFile = generatorDir + "/" + filename;

File fgeneratorFile = new File(generatorFile);

FileWriter fw = new FileWriter(fgeneratorFile);

output = new BufferedWriter( fw );

output.write(writer.getBuffer().toString());

//Stored the list of relative generated files; used for archiving

log.debug("File created "+generatorFile);

}

finally {

//flush and close both "output" and its underlying FileWriter

if (output != null) output.close();

}

} catch (Exception e) {

e.printStackTrace();

log.debug("Velocity exception "+e.getStackTrace());

}

} catch (Exception e) { log.error("Error operning default files file " + defaultLinksFile ); }

}

Saxon XQL versus Beautiful Soup

2008-09-07T14:08:00.000-07:00

I've been looking into HTML parsers recently and I've explored two technologies. The first is SAXON XQL. This is a language which is tricky to master in terms of looping and syntax. Here's an example Saxon XQL file.

declare namespace my = 'my:stuff';

declare variable $my:global as xs:integer := 1;

declare function my:mylen($n as xs:integer) as xs:integer {

$n - 9

};

let $qry := doc("workarea/xfile.html")

return

<div>

{ for $qryItem at $pos in $qry//*:li[@class="g"]

return

if ($pos < 4) then

<div>

<h2>

<a href="{string($qryItem//*:h3//*:a/@href)}">

{string($qryItem//*:h3//*:a)}

</a>

</h2>

{substring(substring-before(string($qryItem//*:div[@class="s"]),"SomeString"),1,my:mylen(string-length(substring-before(string($qryItem//*:div[@class="s"]),"SomeString" ))))}

<br/>

</div>

else ()

}

</div>

One of the problems with Saxon is that it requires xhtml compliant html and it needs to be preprocessed. However, it you use Python's Beautiful Soup, it handles the fact that this is the case and the code is object oriented and quite readable.

data = open(filename)

soup = BeautifulSoup(data)

print soup.html.head.title.string

#for anchor in soup.findAll('a', href=True):

# print anchor['href']

firstnode = soup.find('ul', { "class" : "foo_results" } )

#print firstnode

hreflist = []

anchorcontent = []

bodycontent = []

secondnode = firstnode.findAll('h3')

#print secondnode

for thirdnode in secondnode:

thelink = thirdnode.find('a')

hreflist.append(thelink['href'])

anchorcontent.append(thelink.renderContents())

thebody = firstnode.findAll('p')

for abodyitem in thebody:

#print 'Body item:' + abodyitem.renderContents()

bodycontent.append(abodyitem.renderContents())

print len(hreflist)

Also, it's Python which is very easy to read and there's great support for the libraries. So, I'd recommend Beautiful Soup written in Python over Saxon. Get Beautiful Soup here.

Upload a file from cygwin using FTP

2008-08-28T15:23:00.000-07:00

Here's a nasty problem I ran into. I tried to upload a file on a Windows XP box running Cygwin but none of the Cygwin command line utilities worked e.g ftp, rcp, wput. The problem is that they do not support passive-ftp. So here's the solution I found. It'll work if you write a small python script within Cygwin.

Step 1.

Install python on cygwin. It's a standard package. Go make a cup of coffee or something while it downloads!

Step 2.

Write your script, in my case remote.py

python remote.py <anyfile>

Here's the code.

import ftplib, sys

if len(sys.argv) != 2:

sys.exit("Missing file to transfer")

s = ftplib.FTP('yourhostname.com','username','password') # Connect

print sys.argv[1]

f = open(sys.argv[1],'rb') # file to send

s.cwd('somedirectory')

s.storbinary('STOR '+sys.argv[1], f) # Send the file

f.close() # Close file and FTP

s.quit()

Step 3.

Run the python script, transferring your file. Then have a beer or some tasty alternative :-)

Coldplay 42 Video

2008-07-23T13:59:00.001-07:00

I've listened to a few albums recently but none have impressed me as much as the new Coldplay one. One of my favorite songs is 42 which is very deep but very enjoyable to listen to.

Blogger Test Slide Show

2008-05-09T01:59:00.000-07:00

Google have a slide-show embedder which I am testing here. It can be created at http://docs.google.com

Google's New AppEngine Technology

2008-05-09T01:37:00.000-07:00

I've been accepted by Google to use their latest AppEngine technology. I'm pretty excited about this, even more than Ruby on Rails because it comes with its own datastore and classes to handle Google User authentication which makes me feel a little like I can work with Google without having to actually work in Google as an employee. I've been reading the Tutorial which is pretty good. Professionally, I come from a Java Tomcat background J2EE in the main so what I'd like to see is WAR file support. However, with that said the Python piece looks fine for now. Best of all, Google does the hosting of these apps which is excellent. It's all good and well learning a language but then there is the hassle of trying to find some kind of reliable and affordable hosting. So my expectation is that Google hosting will be reliable. Time will tell but I would assume so on initial inspection. From what I see so far, it's a good start. I need to play some more before I show a working link of a running application.

Benjamin Franklin lightning rod

2008-04-26T03:29:00.000-07:00

Have you ever seen a rod of metal running down the side of a building like a Church and would like to know how the invention occured. Well, Ben Franklin stood out in a lightning storm one day and well, the rest is history...

Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun

2008-04-22T17:32:00.000-07:00

It's time for a video interlude.

Google's New App Service and BigTable

2008-04-21T09:00:00.001-07:00

Recently, Google opened up its new App hosting architecture to folks who are not employees. They're limiting it to 10,000 users and Python right now. However, on a recent tech talk on their site, they also explain how they store their data in a database style implementation they call 'BigTable'. Here's a link to what it is, for the curious.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7278544055668715642

Benjamin Franklin Quotes

2008-04-04T17:21:00.001-07:00

He was one of the founding American fathers but was also a scholar, a diplomat and an inventor. He even taught Marie Antoinette some French!

We all still miss Freddie - Radio Ga Ga

2008-03-28T18:02:00.000-07:00

Everyone goes on about Bohemian Rhapsody but my favorite was Radio Ga Ga. Plus would you look at the hair on them! This was one of Freddie's finest hours imo.

Hilary Clinton gets a call at 4 AM in the morning

2008-03-27T18:44:00.001-07:00

Very shortly Hilary Clinton will get that call and it's going to say: You've lost. Obama won.

Question: What will she do? Can we all rely on her to do the right thing at 4AM and say, well done Obama...?

Somehow I think she'll be taking out the Tanya Harding cookbook but if Bill has any sense, he'll have hidden it from Hilary.

Either way, I think McCain will be the next President... What will he do if he gets a call at 4AM in the morning? Think of Hilary and Obama probably and smile a little to himself as he watched his competition tear themselves to pieces and make his Presidential bid a cakewalk.

Duffy - Mercy

2008-03-23T17:24:00.000-07:00

I'd like to wish everyone a very happy Easter. Pls enjoy the music.

Janet Jackson - Feedback

2008-03-23T10:46:00.001-07:00

Kanye West - Good Life

2008-03-23T10:33:00.001-07:00

Mary J Blige - Just Fine

2008-03-23T10:27:00.001-07:00

Rihanna Umbrella

2008-03-23T10:24:00.000-07:00