Norio's blog

Afvalkalenders.be

litrik — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:59:53 +0100

Earlier this year I started collecting all afvalkalenders for 2010 that people have created and shared in Google Calendar on afvalkalenders.be. Currently the site lists 43 calenders.

So far the response I have received about this small crowd sourcing project has been very positive.

If you have created an afvalkalender in Google Calendar for your town let me know so I can add it to the list.

Slow Ubuntu 9.10 on a Dell Inspiron 6400

litrik — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:24:40 +0100

After upgrading a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 the machine was so slow it was barely usable. top was showing a load average of 7 after opening Firefox or OpenOffice.

Strangely no command was using more than 10% of the CPU, memory consumption seemed pretty normal and there was barely any disk activity. But the system was painfully slow.

After a couple of hours I decided to follow some obscure forum post (link lost, sorry) and I deleted the xorg.conf file and rebooted the machine. After the reboot the machine was as snappy as before the upgrade.

Weird.

I'm going to FOSDEM 2010

litrik — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:53:31 +0100

ipsCA certificates expired

litrik — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:02:02 +0100

ipsCA, a Spanish certification authority, ended 2009 with a bang. Their root certificate expired on December 30th and they had to scramble to send all customers new SSL certificates.

Unfortunately these new certificates are not accepted by all browsers because ipsCA failed to inform all browser vendors on time. Internet Explorer accepts the new certificates only if you have installed the (optional) November 2009 Root Cert Update from Windows update. Mozilla Firefox is still waiting for specific information from ipsCA.

Of course webmasters are upset and angry.

A big no-no when you are in the trust business.

Drush and rsync

litrik — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:03:20 +0100

Both drush and rsync are handy tools to automate the deployment of Drupal sites. You just have to be careful how you combine them.

In my development environment I have a local CVS checkout of drush and I use rsync to push that directory to the remote production server. This way I'm sure both development and production use the same version of drush without the need to install a CVS client on the production server.

Unfortunately my initial attempts to get drush running on the remote system always resulted in the following error message:

The command 'drush.php help' could not be found.

Initially I assumed there was something wrong with the path to the drush executable or the code that detects the location of the drush.php file but only after a while I found the real culprit.

To reduce the number of files that need to be synced I used rsync's --cvs-exclude option. This option makes rsync ignore certain files and directories in the same way CVS does. For example it will filter out all CVS directories. It turns out that a lot more files get excluded:

RCS SCCS CVS CVS.adm RCSLOG cvslog.* tags TAGS .make.state .nse_depinfo *~ #* .#* ,* _$* *$ *.old *.bak *.BAK *.orig *.rej .del-* *.a *.olb *.o *.obj *.so *.exe *.Z *.elc *.ln core .svn/ .git/ .bzr/

Notice core in that list? Guess in which directory drush keeps major parts of its code! By using the --cvs-exclude option of rsync, my remote drush directory was missing approximately 2500 lines of PHP code resulting in the bizarre error message.

The solution is to stop using the --cvs-exclude option or use the --filter option to tune the list of files to exclude during syncing.

Find the latest Scriptura release

litrik — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:32:39 +0100

Even in this day and age, my former employer Inventive Designers refuses to send out an email to all customers when a new version of their (closed source) Scriptura product is available. They only send a notification email to those customers whose bugs have been fixed in the latest release.

The logic behind this decision is that they assume that customers might get worried and confused when they get regular emails about bug fixes. Customers might think "Oh, look at all those fixes. That must be a buggy product.". In my opinion this approach is totally wrong because now I get the impression "I haven't seen any bug fixes lately. Is that product still being maintained?".

Funny thing is that the information about new releases of Inventive Designers' products is available to all customers as long as you log on to their website.

Because they don't send me emails about product updates and I'm getting tired of logging on to the website every couple of days, I wrote a small shell script that pulls the date and version of the latest release from the Inventive Designers website.

The script has been tested on Ubuntu and requires the packages wget and xmlstarlet:

#!/bin/sh

userid=<youremail>
password=<yourpassword>

url=http://protected.inventivedesigners.com/login-drupal.html
xpath="normalize-space(/html/body/div/div/dl/p[1])"

wget -q -O - --post-data="userid=$userid&password=$password" $url \
   | xmlstarlet sel -t -v $xpath

I can understand that software companies want to keep their source closed, but they should never keep their communication closed.

Problems with Eclipse buttons in Ubuntu 9.10

litrik — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:44:44 +0100

After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) some buttons no longer work in Eclipse 3.5. Clicking has no effect but keyboard shortcuts still work.

It looks like Eclipse is doing some ~~nasty stuff~~ advanced hacking in SWT on GTK. This bug is fixed in 3.6M2 but you can work around the issue in Eclipse 3.5 by launching Eclipse through the following small shell script (assuming Eclipse is installed in /opt/eclipse-3.5):

#!/bin/sh
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
/opt/eclipse-3.5/eclipse

Fietsknooppunten in Layar

litrik — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:27:50 +0200

I have created a small layer for the Layar augmented reality browser for mobile devices. It shows all known fietsknooppunten in Flanders.

I have implemented this layer as a Java application deployed on the Google App Engine. It consists of two parts.

A daily cron job downloads a CSV database from Fietsnet (with permission) and stores all entries in the object store.
A servlet responds to requests from the Layar application on the mobile device and returns a JSON response with relevant POIs.

Layar is available for free for Android and iPhone.

Which Year? available in the Android Market

litrik — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 08:37:18 +0200

A couple of days ago I have released the very first version of "Which Year?" - an Android quiz application I started working on a couple of weeks ago - into the Android Market.

The Which Year? website contains more details (incuding a couple of screenshots). If you have an Android device, download the app and let me know what you think.

pidgin-facebookchat ate my bandwidth

litrik — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 15:20:36 +0200

If you are running pidgin-facebookchat make sure you keep an eye on your bandwidth usage.

There is a known bug in version 1.47-1 (which is included in Ubuntu 9.04) that causes huge amounts of network traffic to the Facebook servers. In my case "huge" means "30 GB in less than 2 weeks".

Fortunately the jaunty-backports repository contains a fix so all you need to do is to make sure you have selected "Unsupported updates (jaunty-backports)" on the tab "Updates" of "System > Administration > Software Sources".