Lucid Electric Dreams

Fedora 16 - Kile installation

2011-11-16T18:24:00.001Z

Kile is a fantastic editor for creating LaTEX documents. It is part of the KDE suite of applications, but runs perfectly fine under Gnome when the KDE libraries are installed. Unfortunately, the Kile package in Fedora 16 appears to be broken. When trying to start the application, a dialog box pops up with the message: "No editor component found. Please check your KDE installation". The

Enable graphical plymouth boot in Fedora 16 with nvidia drivers

2011-11-14T22:03:00.001Z

Installation of nvidia drivers under Fedora is well documented. (See http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=204752). In previous versions of Fedora, enabling the plymouth graphical boot was quite easy. All one had to do was to add the following kernel arguments to grub.conf. rdblacklist=nouveau nomodeset vga=ask Starting from release 16, Fedora uses Grub2 as the bootloader. The

Firefox font smoothing in Linux

2011-11-14T19:49:00.001Z

After upgrading to Fedora 16, I noticed that the font rendering looked awful in Firefox. Even an upgrade to Firefox Aurora made no difference. Purely out of desperation, I tried a method I had used previously to fix a similar issue with Chrome, (http://www.lucidelectricdreams.com/2010/09/ugly-font-rendering-in-chrome-linux.html) and hit the jackpot!. The original post by Zach Beane can be found

Installing Caffeine 2.4.1 on Fedora 16

2011-11-14T18:35:00.001Z

Regular readers probably know that I am a big fan of the Caffeine project (https://launchpad.net/caffeine). I even contributed the Gnome Shell patches to it (http://www.lucidelectricdreams.com/2011/06/disabling-screensaverlock-screen-on.html). After a fresh install of Fedora 16 "Verne", I attempted to install the latest version of Caffeine from the project page - which at the moment is 2.4.1 -

Gnome Shell Cheat Sheet

2011-10-17T18:52:00.002+01:00

Some very handy tips here. I particularly wasn't aware that I could use the scroll wheel to zoom in on windows in the overview mode. https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/CheatSheet

GTIN Validation with Python

2011-10-14T00:33:00.002+01:00

GTINs (Global Trade Item Number) are ubiquitous. We commonly see them as barcodes on products. They come in several different types and names such as EAN, UPC or ISBN etc. Recently, I needed to validate a set of GTINs stored in a file. To my surprise (unless my Google-fu is getting weak), I could not find any libraries written in Python for doing this. The algorithm (http://www.gs1.org/barcodes/

Windows 8 Developer Preview

2011-09-14T21:53:00.000+01:00

Microsoft has just released the Developer Preview of Windows 8 - which can be grabbed from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/home/. I had a gander by installing it on a VM. The Metro UI looks quite good and I think it's great that most vendors are moving towards HTML5, CSS and Javascript based apps. (well.. at least they are mostly standardised and for once many giants of the industry are

Using System.getProperty() with Jenkins builds

2011-07-07T19:47:00.000+01:00

One of my recent projects needed to be able to manipulate file paths according to a set of rules and read and process files directly from the file system. When it came to writing unit tests for this module, I was faced with a dilemma. My usual approach for this kind of system is to use the "Test Double" pattern to hide environment specific details from the tests to make them portable across

Oracle client 11g installation under wine

2011-06-16T22:36:00.000+01:00

I am a steadfast Fedora user both at home and at work. However, most of my colleagues tend to use Ubuntu and one of the problems I have come across a few times is the inability to install the Oracle client software under wine in Ubuntu. It all works fine under Fedora, so why does it fail on Ubuntu with the error message "java.lang.NullPointerException at

Reading and writing GSettings from Python

2011-06-14T21:21:00.000+01:00

Here's the class I wrote to read/write the screensaver settings from GSettings. It's probably not in the best Python style, but it illustrates the idea.from gi.repository import Gio,GLibclass GnomeScreenLock: IDLE_DELAY_SCHEMA = 'org.gnome.desktop.session' IDLE_DELAY_KEY = 'idle-delay' IDLE_ACTIVATION_SCHEMA = 'org.gnome.desktop.screensaver' IDLE_ACTIVATION_KEY = 'idle-activation-enabled'

Disabling screensaver/lock-screen on Gnome 3 during Flash movies

2011-06-14T21:05:00.000+01:00

With the release of Gnome 3, most of the old Gnome APIs have undergone major changes. Many of these changes are not backward compatible at all. This presents an interesting challenge; specially at this still early stages of Gnome 3 developement - where almost everything is in a state of flux.I regularly watch tech presentations from conferences - which are usually presented as Flash videos.

Adding your own launchers to gnome-shell dash

2011-06-05T11:06:00.000+01:00

This one has been driving me nuts for days!I have a few applications that I install on my home directory and never copy to the global /usr directories. Naturally, they don't show up in the applications menu. In Gnome 2, adding a shortcut to such an application was as simple as right clicking the panel and selecting "Create new launcher". Unfortunately, since Gnome 3 seems to be designed by Mac

Bufferbloat

2011-06-03T20:00:00.000+01:00

Interesting Google tech talk by Jim Gettys about Bufferbloat: http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleTechTalks#p/u/0/qbIozKVz73gAlso checkout netalyzr to test and gather information about your network connection : http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/

Strong,Soft,Weak and Phantom References in Java

2011-05-21T23:37:00.000+01:00

If you read any documentation on Java garbage collection, the term "strong/weak/soft/phantom reference" crops up quite frequently. It's easy to guess what strong references are, but what the heck is a phantom/weak/soft reference?I stumbled on a very informative post about each of the reference types at http://weblogs.java.net/blog/enicholas/archive/2006/05/understanding_w.html. It is an article

The Python Challenge

2011-05-16T21:43:00.000+01:00

The Python challenge is an online riddle inspired by notpron. The catch is that each level requires you to write some Python code (or Perl, Ruby etc. etc. if you are so inclined) to arrive at the solution. The hardest part is figuring out the cryptic clues. The Python bit is easy; so far, the longest piece of Python I have written to solve a riddle is about 6 lines. (Admittedly, I am still on

Javac type inference bug

2011-05-15T14:09:00.000+01:00

Scenario: A generics based configuration reader that worked perfectly fine under Eclipse, suddenly started failing inside a Jenkins build. The cause was a compilation error: "type parameters of T cannot be determined; no unique maximal instance exists for type variable T with upper bounds int,java.lang.Object".According to this bug report, this is an almost 6 years old javac bug. Apprently

Kill tasks in Windows through the command line

2011-05-12T20:05:00.000+01:00

I received a frantic phone call from my Dad last night, who lives a few thousand miles away, across a few oceans. "My computer is not working. Something is wrong with my hard disk" - he said. "Fix it!". Although it was flattering that my dad thinks that I could magically fix a bad hard drive from a few thousand miles away, it didn't sound quite right because he had just recently bought that

Hadoop Installation Gotchas

2011-03-26T19:21:00.001Z

Over the last few years, with most large scale data processors such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook open-sourcing their internal data crunching algorithms/software, "BigData" projects have taken off exponentially. We are now in the BigData era of computing, where a large number of companies and individuals are contributing to or adopting software stacks such as Hadoop, Cassandra,

Fedora 14 64 bit : Distorted Sounds From Flash Player "SQUARE"

2011-01-03T12:26:00.000Z

If you have been using the new 64 bit beta of Flash Player ("Square") on Fedora 14, you might have noticed that some audio streams are distorted by a weird metallic noise that seems to emanate from the background. Apparently this is caused by a patch to glibc - which removes support for overlapping regions in memcpy. Although this is the right thing to do and clearly Adobe is using memcpy in a

Evince failing to open PDF files

2010-12-20T19:16:00.000Z

I noticed that Evince was suddenly failing to open PDF files with the error message: File type PDF document (application/pdf) is not supported Trying to debug the problem, I tried opening a PDF document through the command line and got the following error message. (evince:1514): EvinceDocument-WARNING **: /usr/lib64/libpoppler-glib.so.5: undefined symbol: cairo_surface_set_mime_data (evince:

Haiku - Remember when...

2010-10-16T11:42:00.000+01:00

Windows 95 was "awesome" and Windows 98 was slated to be "awesomer"? Linux was taking its baby steps and Mac OS was "pretty" and ruled the DTP circuit?? I was a young 'un, getting my feet wet in the magical world of computers. A Pentium 200Mhz with 32MB of RAM was my gateway in to the realm. (Yes.. it had a turbo button). Now, I do realise that there were even more magical times when people

Adobe Flash 'Square' for Linux 64bit

2010-09-16T21:58:00.000+01:00

After putting 64bit native Linux Flash player on hold indefinitely, Adobe have done an about turn and released a version of Flash Player 10.2 'Square' preview for 64 bit Linux as well. Good things about this release are that: After some serious security flaws were discovered, Adobe advised on an upgrade. But for us poor 64bit Linux users, there was no 64 bit version to upgrade to until now.

Ugly font rendering in Chrome Linux Beta and Unstable

2010-09-11T11:08:00.000+01:00

Just upgraded to Google Chrome Beta (6.xx) and then to Unstable (7.xx) in my Fedora box and noticed the butt-ugly font rendering in both versions. Apparently it's a known issue with gtk-webkit, but I would have expected Google to fix something as elementary and important as font rendering before concentrating on anything else. A bit of Googling (ofcourse!) dug up this excellent post that fixed

Firefox 4 Beta On Fedora

2010-09-09T18:18:00.002+01:00

Just stumbled on this blog post while skimming through Google Reader and thought I should share it. To get the latest Beta installed, follow these steps: sudo wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-firefox4.repo http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/firefox4/fedora-firefox4.repo sudo yum install firefox4

DVD Playback on Fedora 13

2010-06-30T22:03:00.000+01:00

I never had a real need to watch DVD's on a computer - so DVD playback was not something I needed to get working with Fedora. Recently however, the need arose and to my surprise, the amount of information on the internet about Linux DVD playback is very out-of-date. libdvdcss - the library required to decrypt DVD content is not distributed by any of the usual repositories due to the licensing/