From the category archives:

Uncategorized

My first linux contribution is a disaster

January 24, 2010

My first attempt to contribute to Linux turns out to be a disaster, with the problem already having been addressed. But why does the source code in Trunk not reflect any changes? I have much to learn about Linux packages and source organisation.

Read the full article →

Ubuntu, Virgin Mobile Internet Pre-paid (in Sydney), and the Huawei e160e

January 21, 2010

How I got my Huawei e160e USB 3G modem working with Virgin Mobile Internet, and Ubuntu 9.10 in Australia (Sydney).

Read the full article →

A bit of xmas admin support

December 29, 2009

A simple request to install Photoshop Elements on Vista leads to much frustration and time wasting. How can the non-technical users deal with this complexity?

Read the full article →

The week in review - 2009-32

August 19, 2009

SpringSource Roo
I just found out this week about SpringSource Roo - a rapid development tools that promises:
Working applications within 10 minutes of finishing the download
I haven’t used it yet, but at first glance it looks like a Grails/Rails type tool but being plain Java based as opposed to Groovy or Ruby based. This is a [...]

Read the full article →

Error executing script War: No such property: stagingDir for class: _Events

April 1, 2009

While trying out my new Morph Grails hosting account, I installed the morph-deploy plugin and then promptly discovered that ‘grails war’ failed with
Error executing script War: No such property: stagingDir for class: _Events
It turns out this is a known problem with Grails 1.1 and the solution is to delete the _Events.groovy file in
[your home [...]

Read the full article →

The price of buying books online

February 15, 2009

I wish all books were available as PDFs. I don’t like the physical space real books take up, and I don’t appreciate paying for delivery, or waiting for delivery. Some books are available for Kindle, but I just want a PDF.
Recently I wanted to buy 4 books - my first instinct was to go to [...]

Read the full article →

Conspiracy or oversight?

January 20, 2009

A recent Computerworld article referenced Linux, Mac OS X and Windows Vista. They linked Mac OS X and Windows Vista to their search but they didn’t link Linux. Conspiracy? Oversight?

Read the full article →

SoundJuicer and MP3

December 24, 2008

I wanted to convert some CDs to MP3 - normally I’d use OGG, but you can’t always rely on devices being able to play that format (i.e. DVD players). I was relieved to see it is easy in Ubuntu 8.10:

enable multiverse and universe repos
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse  sound-juicer
start sound-juicer and go to Edit/Preferences and switch [...]

Read the full article →

Comment spam

December 23, 2008

I’ve been wondering for a while why people spam blogs with comments like:
Your site is so cool, thanks it really helped me!
Or any of the many variations. Its usually obvious for several reasons (spelling and just completely out of context) that this is spam.
But why bother?
It turns out that some blogging software is set up [...]

Read the full article →

A better StringTokenizer

December 22, 2008

I’ve just been reminded how painful it can be splitting a string based on a token with StringTokenizer. The problem is that it gets messy when you have two tokens consecutively. Luckily commons-lang comes to the rescue with StrTokenizer - where empty tokens may be removed or returned as null.

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries