From the monthly archives:

March 2009

Playlists with MythTV

March 22, 2009

I’ve been wanting a way to use playlists on my media center either from within MythTV or with any other player. The reason is I have a bunch of short videos (music and documentaries) that I’d like to be able to play consecutively.
It turns out to be a case of just RTFM. You can create [...]

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Hey! Where’d my swap go?

March 21, 2009

I’ve just noticed that I’ve got no swap space! (Dell 1525 running Ubuntu 8.10).
I first installed my laptop with Ubuntu 8.04, and later upgraded to 8.10. After the upgrade I noticed that hibernate no longer worked, and I think (from memory) I found an error message saying something about not enough swap space. I briefly [...]

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Grails Openid plugin and Xerces

March 18, 2009

I just created a grails 1.1 application, and installed the openid plugin. When starting the application, I got the following exception:
2009-03-17 22:25:41,090 [main] ERROR context.ContextLoader - Context initialization failed
org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name ‘consumerManager’: Instantiation of bean failed; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.BeanInstantiationException: Could not instantiate bean class [org.openid4java.consumer.ConsumerManager]: Constructor threw exception; nested exception [...]

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Set default browser in Ubuntu

March 17, 2009

To set the default browser, use update-alternatives as shown below:
paul@dell1525:~$ sudo update-alternatives –config x-www-browser
There are 2 alternatives which provide `x-www-browser’.
Selection Alternative
———————————————–
1 /usr/bin/firefox-3.0
*+ 2 /usr/bin/seamonkey
Press enter to keep [...]

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Podcatching solution

March 17, 2009

I’m getting closer to a podcatching solution with gpodder. Gpodder is a simple and easy to use podcatcher - and importantly, it can be invoked from the command line in a non-interactive mode. This is important because of my internet plan - I get twice as much download quota on off-peak times as I do [...]

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Extra Ubuntu Repositories

March 16, 2009

A friend put me on to this blog post about extra repositories for Ubuntu. This is a great resource which highlights some great (and possibly essential) software that you should know about if you are running Ubuntu (and possibly any linux flavour).
Have a look, you may find some software listed there of interest to you. [...]

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Getting rid of Root email

March 15, 2009

I’ve got a Linux VPS through RimuHosting - I’m no system admin, and the root account gets a pile of email spam. This takes up disk space so I try to regularly delete it. The best way I’ve found is to us Mutt - a console based email reader.
Firing up Mutt as root displays the [...]

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Groovy and Grails books

March 15, 2009

The catalog of Groovy and Grails books keeps growing, so if you are in the market for some, check out these sources:
Pragmatic programmer

Grails
Groovy

Apress

Grails
Groovy

Manning

Grails in Action
Groovy in Action

On Amazon:

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Removing svn files

March 15, 2009

I recently needed to clean up and remove all of the svn files in a directory structure. I found the answer here, a simple linux command line to recursively delete .svn folders:
find . -name “.svn” -print0 | xargs -0 rm -Rf

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Over typing -Dskip.junit=true

March 13, 2009

I generally prefer Maven2, but I’m currently on a project using a custom ant build script - and I’m over having to type -Dskip.junit=true when I just want to generate a quick jar without running the tests.
To easily switch off tests, I modified ant.bat so that it looks for a command line parameter ’st’ and [...]

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