XiuxiXiuxi

How to use easy_install through a proxy

2011-11-25T10:10:00.001+08:00

You first need to make sure that the shell variable http_proxy is defined:

$ env | grep http_proxy
http_proxy=http://your-proxy.com:yourport

On this done you can run simply run easy_install as follow:

sudo -E easy_install your_package

The "-E" parameter for sudo preserves your environment (namely variables) which is not the default behavior.

How to fix windows 7 install stuck at step "Finalizing your settings"

2011-11-22T06:45:00.001+08:00

While trying to install windows 7 on my shiny Macbook, after the whole ordeal i had went through (See here and here for more details), I finally had the install going and was at the last step.

By last step I mean my computer had already rebooted several times, went through "Setting up your computer for first time use", and was at the step "Finalizing your settings".

Unfortunatly this last step took forever. By Forever i mean, after leaving my computer at it the whole night, was still stuck there in the morning.

After a bit of investigation on Mr Google, i found out that you can start a console by pressing "Shift-F10". I then typed:

tasklist /v | more



Image Name                     PID Session Name        Session#    Mem Usage Status          User Name                                              CPU Time Window Title                                                            
========================= ======== ================ =========== ============ =============== ================================================== ============ ========================================================================
System Idle Process              0 Services                   0         24 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                    13:03:01 N/A                                                                     
System                           4 Services                   0        500 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:27 N/A                                                                     
...
svchost.exe                   1840 Services                   0      1,908 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL SERVICE                              0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
SearchIndexer.exe              752 Services                   0     10,956 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:03 N/A                                                                     
cmd.exe                       1176 Console                    1      7,372 K Running         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 \sources\$oem$\post\kb890830-x86.exe                                    
conhost.exe                   1244 Console                    1      1,392 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
svchost.exe                    240 Services                   0      2,020 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL SERVICE                              0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
svchost.exe                   1956 Services                   0      5,828 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
cmd.exe                       3816 Console                    1      2,672 K Running         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 Administrator: C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe - tasklist  /v

And there I saw this KB installer which didn't seem to be doing anything. So i simply killed it with "taskkill /PID 1176"

And tadam, the computer finally finished installed.

Install Windows 7 with bootcamp on mac (Part 2)

2011-11-21T19:28:00.001+08:00

Small resume from Part 1:

I am the (un)happy owner of a late 2008 Macbook Pro
My super Drive is DEAD
I have Mac OS X Lion installed on my mac
For whatever (foolish) reason I want to install Windows 7 on a Bootcamp partition
I used Bootcamp 4.0.1

In the guide below i will explain how i managed to (finally) install Windows 7 on my bootcamp partition. But before we go further, some important warning. This whole procedure is at best dangerous, and is not for the faint hearted. It can possibly screw up your disk, follow it at your own risk. I strongly advise that you read this guide completely before starting this whole procedure by yourself. Now that you've been warned, let's get started.

Pre-requisite:

Have Virtual Box installed on you Mac
Have everything back up because there's a possibility that this procedure screw up your disk
Download and put on a separate USB disk the WindowsSupport (using bootcamp assistant)

What this guide does is essentially do the initial install step of windows (copying all the files, formatting ...) from inside a VM, stop the VM right after the first reboot, and then reboot your real machine this time to continue and finish the install.

At the time of writing this guide i have VirtualBox 4.1.6 r74713, and i'm running Mac OS 10.7.2.

Step 0: BACK UP ! and make sure you have an install CD / DVD / USB handy.

Use whatever solution you like, to backup your data, be it Time Machine, SuperDuper or iBackup. If you still don't have back up do it now.

Step 1: Create a Bootcamp partition using the bootcamp assistant

Step 2: Unmount / Eject Bootcamp partition if you can see it in your Finder

Step 3: Create Virtual disk

I created a folder that will contain the virtual disk and the VM itself.

mkdir -p ~/VirtualBox VMs/B7
cd ~/VirtualBox VMs/B7
sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk0s3
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0 -filename bootcamp.vmdk -partitions 3
sudo chmod 777 *.vmdk

The step above assume that your bootcamp partition is the 3rd one on the first disk (using "diskutil list" in a terminal):

Step 4: Create a VM Using the vmdk you just created:
Once you have the virtual disk created, you can start VirtualBox and create a new virtual machine, make sure you use the disk you just create as the VM disk.

Step 5: Format and Install Windows 7

Once the above is done, you can start booting up the VM on your install CD/ISO. When you get to the screen of partition selection make sure to select the one named "BOOTCAMP":

Then Click on "Drive options" and then "Format":

Note that after formatting the disk the name of the partition is changed to basically nothing. Nothing to be alarmed about. You can then proceed to the next step and let windows do its job, until it reaches the first reboot.

When you reach the first reboot, let the VM shutdown properly, but when it restarts, turn it off for good. It now time to reboot your real machine and continue the setup in "Hardware mode" so to speak. When your Mac reboots, don't forget to hold the "Option" key to be able to boot on the windows partition.

Thanks to Anil Dash from which i got the idea of create a virtual disk pointing to a real partition.

Hope this guide will help.

PS: There was an unforseen Part 3 where the Windows Installer got stuck.

Install Windows 7 with bootcamp on mac (Part 1)

2011-11-21T19:24:00.001+08:00

In this serie of articles, i will describe the steps I followed while trying to install a Windows 7 in bootcamp. I will try to make this guide as detailed as possible in hope it'll be helpful to other people. But before i dive in a bit of context, that has its importance.

My computer is a MacBook Pro of late 2008, whose Superdrive is unfortunately dead, which meant i was not able to simple put in the DVD install of Windows 7, which left me with trying to install it from a USB Key. Unfortunately, my Mac being from late 2008, it means that boot from USB is out of the question, which i only discovered after trying to the steps below.

The guide below will detail how to create a bootable USB on a 2008 MacBook Pro (and by extension on a Mac that doesn't support boot on USB). If that's not of interest you can skip to Part 2 directly.

Also important point I have OSX Lion installed, more importantly Bootcamp 4.0.1.

It has a very nice option that allows you to create a USB boot disk (on top of creating bootcamp partition, and downloading Windows Support files). Having read that i wanted to give it a try. But when i started it, the "Create a Windows 7 install disk" was grayed:

That is due, as I understand, to the fact that my Mac model is not supposed to be able to boot from USB. In order to solve that I had to tinker with the "Boot Camp Assistant" application.

First Ctrl+Click on "Boot Camp Assistant", then "Show Package Contents" > Contents, then edit "info.plist:

USBBootSupportedModels

    MBP51 
    IM130
    MM50
    MP60
    MB80
    MBP90
    MBA40

To figure out the model use the "System Information", next to "Model Identifier":

From the name it was pretty easy to figure out the reference is MBP51. A MacBook would have been MBxx and a MacBook Air MBAxx.

After saving the file, i was able to create a USB Boot Disk using the assistant.

Also this whole procedure didn't work (and probably won't work for anyone in the same situation), it might be helpful if you need to create an usb boot disk for another new machine.

Now for the meaty bits, head over to Part 2.

How to install cx_Oracle and oracle client on debian

2011-11-17T12:08:00.001+08:00

In this post i'm going to explain how to install and use the python lib named cx_Oracle on a debian box. To make things a little more spicy, i will start from the assumption that oracle is not installed on the box, and that i don't want to install a full fledged oracle server on my box.

So after this procedure i will have a minimal install of oracle libs, that means the bare minimum to use cx_Oracle. More precisely, that means no oracle client, no sqlplus will be on that box.

The first step is to download the oracle instant client and the cx_Oracle library that matches. Out of laziness, i decided to use the pre compiled version of cx_Oracle.

Do download oracle instant client, go on oracle website here. Then choose the platform that / library that matches your oracle server. For me it was "instantclient-basiclite-linux32-11.2.0.2.0.zip"

Once you have downloaded that file unzip it and install it. I personnaly chose to install it in (i.e move the unzipped folder) into /usr/local/lib.

Once this done, you need to define two variables:

export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/local/lib/instantclient_11_1
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib/instantclient_11_1

Once this is done, we can move on to install cx_Oracle. I downloaded the RPM version that matches my python and oracle version, in my case cx_Oracle-5.1.1-11g-py26-1.i386.rpm.

Being under debian, RPM is not the favored method to install packages. Fortunately there's an utility that allows to convert RPMs to DEB files called alien. Here's the steps to install alien and cx_Oracle:

# install alien
sudo apt-get install alien

# convert cx_Oracle-5.1.1-11g-py26-1.i386.rpm to cx_Oracle-5.1.1-11g-py26-1.i386.deb and install it
alien -i cx_Oracle-5.1.1-11g-py26-1.i386.rpm

Once that done, there's one last step. This installed cx_Oracle library was installed under /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages. Unfortunatly by default, site-packages wasn't part of the default python search path. There's several ways to go around that which i won't describe at length (more details here under "Modifying Python’s Search Path"). I chose to modify site.py under /usr/lib/python2.6/ (mostly because it's the first but probably not the last package that will be installed in site-packages).

In order to do that I simply edited site.py and searched for addsitepackages and edited it as follow:

def addsitepackages(known_paths):
    """Add site-packages (and possibly site-python) to sys.path"""
    sitedirs = []
    seen = []

    for prefix in PREFIXES:
        if not prefix or prefix in seen:
            continue
        seen.append(prefix)

        if sys.platform in ('os2emx', 'riscos'):
            sitedirs.append(os.path.join(prefix, "Lib", "site-packages"))
        elif os.sep == '/':
            sitedirs.append(os.path.join(prefix, "local/lib",
                                        "python" + sys.version[:3],
                                        "dist-packages"))
            sitedirs.append(os.path.join(prefix, "lib",
                                        "python" + sys.version[:3],
                                        "dist-packages"))
            sitedirs.append(os.path.join(prefix, "lib", "dist-python"))

            ##################
        # added following line to make site-packages part of default search path
            #################
            sitedirs.append(os.path.join(prefix, "lib",
                                        "python" + sys.version[:3],
                                        "site-packages"))

        else:
            sitedirs.append(prefix)
            sitedirs.append(os.path.join(prefix, "lib", "site-packages"))

        if sys.platform == "darwin":
            # for framework builds *only* we add the standard Apple
            # locations. Currently only per-user, but /Library and
            # /Network/Library could be added too
            if 'Python.framework' in prefix:
                sitedirs.append(
                    os.path.expanduser(
                        os.path.join("~", "Library", "Python",
                                     sys.version[:3], "site-packages")))

    for sitedir in sitedirs:
        if os.path.isdir(sitedir):
            addsitedir(sitedir, known_paths)

    return known_paths

After all that, you should be able to type "import cx_Oracle".

Eclipse syntax highlighting: how to configure same occurrence color properly

2011-10-26T14:43:00.002+08:00

Eclipse has some nice syntax highlighting feature, especially with the popular add-on "Eclipse Color Theme" from the Market place. The result is pretty nice, at least for my taste:

(here the obsidian theme)

On very nice feature is the ability to highlight automatically same occurrences of same. Unfortunately as you see here the "follow" keyword is totally bloated and unreadable.

This can be configured, but it's that there's a legion of option for syntax highlighting. This one is actually controlled by "annotations", more specifically "C++ occurences":

And its suddenly much more readable.

Enabling proxy under Debian

2011-10-14T18:11:00.001+08:00

In order to enabled a proxy, there's two main places (at least for my use this did the trick, there's probably are others). The first one is simple defining the following variables:

export http_proxy="http://your.proxy.com:your_port"

export ftp_proxy="http://your.proxy.com:your_port"

Secondly in order to have apt-get work through proxy, you need to update /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/proxy (or create it):

Acquire::http::Proxy "http:///your.proxy.com:your_port";

VirtualBox: Creating new VM by duplicating existing one

2011-10-14T18:06:00.003+08:00

The other day i tried to create a new VM by duplicating an existing one. Everything worked perfectly ... except all network interface were disable. And it was impossible to mount up those network interfaces.

If you duplicated a new VM from an existing one, you have to do a couple of things. First MAC addresses should be changed in new VM.

Then once the VM is created, disabled all network interface and boot it up. Once the machine is started, there's a couple of files to update for the hostname. I'm using a Debian squeeze, so path may change in other distributions:

/etc/hosts

/etc/hostname

Then you need to need to edit /etc/udev/rules.d/. What happens is it maps the "new" mac address to a new interface. You just need to remove the old one and rename the new one (thanks to the solution from this forum: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=7749)

Using Eclipse as your R IDE

2011-06-09T21:26:00.000+08:00

There's a bunch of possible IDE which are R specific, amongst which to name a few:

RKWard
R Studio (my personal favorite)
Rattle
...

There's a very long list each with their own pros and cons, which I don't intend to discuss in this post.

What i do want to discuss is the usage of Eclipse as a R IDE. Why use it compared to other. Well being a developer during the day, I rather like the idea of using the same tool at night so to speak. Another added bonus on top of syntax completion, object inspection, is the integration with an which ever SCM you like to use. For me that's the icing on the cake. Time being of the essence I don't want to look anything and relying on a SCM is a perfect way to do that.

Now enough talk. In order to have that integration working you need a couple of things:

StatET: that's the eclipse plugin (see here)
rj : that's the "other side of StatET (see here)
rJava: that's a java binder with R (see here)

Then follow the excellent step by step guide here on how to setup Eclipse itself in order to work with R.

Enjoy

Mercurial integration with SVN.

2011-05-23T16:17:00.000+08:00

I've recently been evaluating integration of SVN with some other distributed source control systems, mainly Git and Mercurial. The idea is to have a distributed source control system that would integrate seamlessly with a central SVN repository (very slow and painfull access over internet). That allows a certain number of things, amongst which there is fast access to commit history, cheap branches to experiment...

At some point I had both Mercurial and Git installed, and decided it was time to do a bit of cleanup. I have a bias towards Mercurial because it has a better integration in Windows explorer through TortoiseHG (you can call that lazyness).

After uninstalling everything I started clean, installed the latest TortoiseHG version (which btw has a very nice GUI), as well as hgsubversion as explained here: Getting started with HGSubversion

Mercurial was working fine but I was running into the following error each time I tried to clone our repo:



hg clone svn+ssh://myuser@myrepo.com/someotherpath

destination directory: someotherpath

abort: Can't create tunnel: The system cannot find the file specified.

That error message has been driving me nuts for a while, and after trying a lot of things (uninstalling everything, installing Git again, checking library versions ...), I stumbled upon the solution :



set SVN_SSH="C:\\Program Files\\PuTTY\\plink.exe"

As simple as that... Just define that variable SVN_SSH and it worked flowlessly. After that I justed defined it in my user environment to make it persist.

Hopefully this will help someone else.

K-means clustering using R

2011-05-07T11:24:00.000+08:00

I'm trying to learn R, and I'm a firm believer that there's not better way to learn than by getting your hands dirty. After reading an excellent post on Intelligent Trading blog, it got me thinking how you would do a clustering analysis with R, using K-means.

In the rest of this post I will try to detail the different steps that I followed, in hope that it can be useful to others. In this post I will be using a couple of R packages, namely quantmod, fpc and a few others. The most crucial is quantmod. You can install it with:

They are used for:

quantmod: this is your bread and butter to ease time series analysis
graphics, scatterplot3d, gplots RColorBrewer are used for plotting
fpc: this packages is package dedicated to clustering

First this article supposes that you already have your data handy in a xts object used by quantmot. If it's not the case have a look at this article.

In the details below, "x" is the name of the object that contains my timeserie. Now let dig into it.

The first thing you need to do is create matrix with the different criteria you want to use for the clustering. In my case I'm going to use three normalized ratios, Close / Open, High / Open, Low / Open , and then stuff them into a matrix. Then you want to process the actual cluster and display it:

The result looks like:

This works pretty well, except you have to specify a number of cluster you're looking for. Another may to do this is through the pamk function from the fpc package, for for which you don't specify the actual number of cluster, it will be calculated (you provide a range of value though):

Note the difference with kmeans method, the cluster information is packed into a pam object. That why you access the cluster details through zpamk$pamobject.

Enjoy.

Thumbnails for Videos

2011-05-06T22:38:00.002+08:00

I recently installed a web gallery to host photos and videos named Zenphoto. It works perfectly to my taste except for a small detail. Video galleries load a flash player named flowplayer, which does the job nicely, but until you click on the actual video to make the flash player load, you can't see a thumbnail of the video.

The solution to have thumbnails for videos in Zenphotos, the same way you have for photos, is to place a jpg with the same name as the video. For instance if you have a video named a.mp4, create a jpeg named a.jpg in the same folder as the video. This photo will be used as thumbnail for you video.

It's fine to do a few manually ... but call me lazy I don't fancy the extra manual step each time I need to add a new video. So a create a little script to generate the thumbnails.

Before digging in the details, it assumes a few things. First this only works under linux, so you must not be afraid of command line. Secondly it relies on ffmpeg to extract a frame automatically.

If you don't have ffmpeg and you're using an Ubuntu / Debian type:

Then you into the folder under which the videos are and type:

And paste the following content into the file:

Run the script and you're done.

How to load csv data with quantmod in R

2011-04-21T22:59:00.002+08:00

In this article I'm going to describe how to load data in an xts object, which is the preferred object to handle time series quantmod from a CSV file. This article is really for beginner (like myself), hopefully those can be helpful to others.

Let's imagine you have some csv data that look like:

First thing you need to make sure is that you column headers have names that contain Open, High, Low and Close. This will make you life much easier. Secondly, your csv file should only contain dates, and numerical data, otherwise it's kind of a hassle and you have to go and manually convert data afterwards. So what your data should really look like is:

Personnally I "massaged" the data in R, but you could very well do that in Excel, Perl, Python, or whatever tool you fancy (or simply correct the data at the source ;) ) but for the sake of example this is how I did it:

Now that you have the correct data, it's pretty simple to load :

You're now the proud owner of an xts object that you can start abusing in all the ways you'd like ;)

Hope this helps

How to extract a DEB file

2011-04-18T23:44:00.000+08:00

DEB files are ar archives, which contain three files:

debian-binary
control.tar.gz
data.tar.gz

The actual data is contained into data.tar.gz. You can extract it with the following command:

ar p yourfile.deb data.tar.gz | tar xz

Compiling a linux kernel on a Debian "like" distribution

2011-04-17T10:02:00.003+08:00

I recently had to re-compile a kernel, and there's a few preliminaries. You need to install a bunch of packages :

sudo apt-get install fakeroot build-essential crash kexec-tools makedumpfile kernel-wedge
sudo apt-get install kernel-package

After that you can follow the excellent guide here:

Compilling a Kernel the Old Debian Fashionned Way

One point which I had missed though is where are the packages once you've finished compiling (although it's written in the guide). So if like they recommend in the you've extracted the kernel source under ~/src/linux-source-2.6.35 for instance, then the deb packages will be in ~/src.

Enjoy.

Edit Formula: Alternative to F2 for Excel Mac

2011-04-10T22:44:00.002+08:00

One of the most used keyboard shortcut is F2, which allows to edit the formula in a cell without using the mouse. Unfortunately that shortcut is different between Office for Mac and Office Windows.

This shortcut was F2 in a PC, but in Excel for Mac it turns into Ctrl + U. Unfortunately not the most effective shortcut, as it's rather difficult to press Ctrl + U with one hand on most keyboards.

Windows Shortcut: F2

Mac Shortcut: Ctrl + U

Excel Mac: Cell Reference Lock - F4 Alternative

2011-04-10T22:43:00.002+08:00

One of the first major problem that I faced when I first began using Excel on a Mac, was the appropriate shortcut replacement for F4, which adds $ signs to cell references to lock cell/range references from moving if dragged to another cell. After a great deal of frustration, and after trawling a number of excel forums I eventually found the solution which is shown below.

Windows Shortcut: F4

Mac Shortcut : Cmd + T

Install from Perl modules from CPAN without confirmation

2011-04-10T22:40:00.000+08:00

If need to install modules from CPAN, especially if you want to install a whole bunch in one go without having to confirm every ten seconds try running your install as follow:

PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT=1 perl -MCPAN -e 'install My::Module'

Additionally if you want to make sure that the install script will pull all the required dependencies (should be by default, but heh ...):

cpan

cpan> o conf prerequisites_policy follow

cpan> o conf commit

That's it.

Find closest and fastest repository for your Debian

2011-04-05T10:13:00.001+08:00

I recently installed a new distrib with linux mint based on Debian. I've done that scores of times, but one thing i never remember is how to find the best repo (and the fastest of course) based on your location.

There's a very neet package that will do the work for your:

sudo apt-get install netselect-apt
sudo netselect-apt

And Voila, you're done.

Update Debian Squeeze to Mint ~ a.k.a Mintify your Debian

2011-04-04T22:38:00.000+08:00

I've been willing to install a new linux for a while, more precisely a Linux Mint distrib for various reasons. Call me lazy i didn't wanted to download and burn a full DVD. So the came the idea to use a Debian install as a base (since there is a version called LMDE base on Debian instead of Ubuntu.

At the time of this post, Debian has recently updated Squeeze to stable, so that the freshly baked Linux Mint isn't too far away (LMDE is supposed to be based on the current testing debian).

If you want to follow the same steps as me, this post assumes a couple of things:

You can and will use command line without fear
You know what debian is and can read log messages or use test installer
You computer is already connected to internet

Some thanks to those two posts which i used as a base and mix together with my own twist:
HOWTO: Create a custom, minimal LMDE install
Mintifying Debian

Enough talk, let's get down to it. First you'll need to download a ISO of Debian, i used the businesscard version. You can find other version fitting to your need / architecture here:
http://www.debian.org/releases/squeeze/debian-installer/

1) Download it, burn it or put it on a USB key, which ever you prefer and install debian.

Once the install is completed, and you've added yourself as a sudoer ,you can proceed.

2) Then you may want to add the contrib and non-free Debian repositories by editing the file /etc/apt/sources.list and adding “contrib non-free” without quotes right at the end of each line ending with “main”.

4) Next you add the Debian Multimedia and the Mint repositories. You can for instance create a file within /etc/apt/sources.list.d called “lmde.list” and add these two lines into it:

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org squeeze main non-free

5) Updates :

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linuxmint-keyring
wget -c http://www.debian-multimedia.org/pool/main/d/debian-multimedia-keyring/debian-multimedia-keyring_2010.12.26_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i debian-multimedia-keyring_2010.12.26_all.deb
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Now the trick start here. Apparently when Squeeze went from testing to stable a particular package called "gstreamer0.10-pitfdll" has been removed from Debian repo cause the all meta package mint-meta-debian to fall to pieces. With some error message that look like:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:

mint-meta-debian : Depends: mint-meta-codecs but it is not going to be installed



The following packages have unmet dependencies:

mint-meta-codecs : Depends: gstreamer0.10-pitfdll but it is not installable

E: Broken packages

But fear not, here's the solution:
wget -c http://debian.securedservers.com/debian/pool/contrib/g/gstreamer0.10-pitfdll/gstreamer0.10-pitfdll_0.9.1.1+cvs20080215-1_i386.deb

dpkg -i gstreamer0.10-pitfdll_0.9.1.1+cvs20080215-1_i386.deb

Now you can safely proceeed to the Mintifying of your debian:
apt-get install mint-meta-debian

Enjoy.

Parallels Desktop: Garbled or no sound problem

2009-11-22T18:02:00.001+08:00

Last week I decided that I wanted to try Parallels Desktop on OS X. I wanted to test playing games in a VM on OS X. So I created a virtual machine with windows XP installed on it. I used a install CD I still had form the time I still had a PC.

Everything worked out pretty, and the machine was up and kicking in no time, except for one thing, the sound. I search for quite some time on internet, including on Parallels forum before figuring it out.

The problem I had was, I had either no sound at all, or some all garbled up sound. The multimedia wasn't detected properly. I tried different drivers, installed Realtek AC'97 Driver, and a couple of other, but nothing wotked. I kept getting crappy sound or nothing at all. If you ask me I prefered no sound at all to garbled sound. That's just terrible.

Now the solution to my problem, and other in the past it seems is quite simple. The source of the problem is that Parallels Desktop (I'm using version 4) is emulating an Intel onboard sound card (Intel 82801BA/BAM AC'97 Audio Controller to be precise). And the Windows XP installation CD I used happens to be missing that particular driver (probably because it was an OEM cd from an old computer). So I just reinstalled my Parallels Desktop VM using a proper retail Windows XP installation CD, and it worked like a charm.

Everything is now detected properly:

Now everything is working properly and I was able to try out playing games inside a VM. And let me tell you it works just fine. So far i've tried playing Eve Online and DDO inside a VM and with decent details its quite fluid.

How to get Adsense ads more relevant to your site content

2009-10-18T11:04:00.002+08:00

Adsense is a great tool to generate revenue on your pages, and very easy to use. A couple of click and editing into your site or blog (widget installation maybe), and you're good to go.

But you may have noticed that something the ads displayed on your site by Adsense, are not that relevant, it not totally out of it. The reason why this happens, is because, Adsense just like Google (the search engine side of the business ;) ) uses bots to crawl on your site and analyze its content. Up to here nothing that you wouldn't expect. The catch is, everything that is on your site may not always be relevant content, and those bots have no way to identify what is and what's not.

Naturally, the trick would be to be able to "guide" those bots in the right direction and clearly indicate the content they have to consider. This can be done with the help of two specific tags that you need to include into the code of your site. If you have a blog, that's around the body of your article, any part, box, div, etc.. that wraps what you want to be indexed. Those two tags are and .

The explanation that follow are a bit specific to blogger since that's what I'm using, but the general procedure is similar whatever the blog or site.

So in blogger you have to edit your template. If you don't know how to edit your template your can check this article. Now that you're editing your template you want to start searching the following:

<data:post.body>

And replace it with:

<!-- google_ad_section_start-->
      <data:post.body/>
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Here you notice that we point for Adsense the content we want to be used for your ads. Now you want want to do the opposite instead, that is point to the sections you don't want to be considered. In order to do that you have to wrap the content to ignore the same way we wrapped the post's body above:


Your content to ignore goes here


And That's it. It is as simple as that. One important note is, the change in your ads won't be immediate, and it may take up to two weeks for the change to actually reflect in the content of your ads.

I hope this will be useful to you, don't hesitate to drop me a line if you that post helped you.

Code Syntax Highlingting plugin

2009-10-11T16:49:00.002+08:00

If you post any source code on your blog (site) and want to have some syntax highlighting like this on your website then this posts is for you:

alert("Hello World");
 // Example of code

I will concentrate here on how to set it up for blogger but it's basically vadid for any website. More details on that at the end of the post. But let's talk about the plugin a bit.

Supported Languages

This plugin at the time I'm writing this article supports the following languages:

ActionScript3
Bash/shell
C#
C++
CSS
Delphi
Diff
Groovy
JavaScript
Java
JavaFX
Perl
PHP
Plain
PowerShell
Python
Ruby
Scala
SQL
Visual Basic
XML (as well as xslt, html, xhtml)

Not bad heh ;) And there are much much more which haven't made they way to the official package.

Installing the plugin

In order to set this up you will have to edit your template layout. To do that, go to your blogger dashboard and click on "Layout" and then click on "Edit HTML", and search for:

]]></b:skin>

and paste the following code.

<link href="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/styles/shCore.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<link href="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/styles/shThemeDefault.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<script src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shCore.js" type="text/javascript">
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushJScript.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushBash.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushSql.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushXml.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushCpp.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushVb.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<!-- add brushes here -->
<script type='text/javascript'>
SyntaxHighlighter.config.bloggerMode = true;
SyntaxHighlighter.all();
</script>

Using the plugin

Once you've completed previous step, all you have to do is to start writing a post, and when you have to put some code, switch to the "Edit HTML" tab and use pre tags as follow:

<pre class="brush: js">
 <!-- Your code goes here -->
</pre>

You need to change the language code (in this case js) to match the language you want to highlight.

Make sure to replace all instances of < with <.

Don't worry if your text looks funny in the "Compose" tab, it's going to be fine when you few the post normally.

Where to know more about it:

This little baby is named SyntaxHighlighter ans it is the fruit of several years of Alex Gorbatchev efforts. You can find more on his website. You will find there the full list of scripts you can include to get syntax highlighting for different languages. There's also different theme css.

I hope this will be useful to you as well.

2 greats tools to develop and test regular expressions

2009-10-07T14:54:00.000+08:00

Regular expression are a very powerful tool that every developer should know, use, and I'd even dare say abuse. But just because they are useful doesn't mean they are easy to use and master. It can even be rather painful to develop and test them.

This is mostly due to the lack of good tools to help test regular expression. By lack I mean that there is not a lot, but there's two that I've found pretty useful and up to the task.

Expresso

Expresso is a very need piece of software that allow you create test, and debug your regular expression. It has everything one may want to work with regular expressions:

It has 3 differents tabs:

the first one regular expression testing
the second one is a regular expression designer
the last one is your regular expression library, which contains a set of commonly used regular expression, but also the history of regular expression you've used recently

It can even generate C# code to use the regular expression you've designed. You can export to several languages ( C#, VB, C++)

All in all that the one I most often use.

Rubular

The second one is called Rubular and comes in the form of an online tool. It is much simpler and doesn't boast as much features as Expresso, but what it does it does well. If you just want a quick testing tool for your regular expression, without installing anything, then Rubular is what you want:

Quick & easy, straightforward and efficient.

Now where to find those. For Expresso, you can find it here, and for Rubular it's available at this address. I hope you find those tools useful.