Yearly Archives: 2005

New Year mayhem

I’m now in my Dad’s place in Clare, chilling untill I go up to Carrick-on-Shannon to meed all the lads for a New Year celebration extravaganza. I’ve stocked up on my Miller and am ready to get pissed as a fart.

I’m looking forward to next year and I have a few New Year resolutions that I’ll be posting.

As usual Ryanair surpassed themselves yesterday efficiency-wise but it has to be worst turbulence and landing ever, Gill nearly got into the brace position it was so bad(no saucy comments please) .

ps. Dialup sucks.. I’ve been on it for 20 minutes and already I am bored waiting.

Toshiba L5 madness

I previously noted that my Dad had a Toshiba Libretto L5. When he was in Japan though, he upgraded to a super tiny Sony Vaio. What did he do with the L5…. Gave it to me he did.

Libretto L5 from top

I am in awe of this beast.. so bloody light and quick too. I just ordered another 256Mb Ram (will be 512Mb in total when that arrives)

Libretto L5 from side

It’s got a 800MHz Crusoe processor and built in wireless, USB 2.0 SD Card reader and a very good widescreen display.

I’ve got 3 laptops now but this baby is a definite keeper.

Embedding SVG

I wanted to use SVG for a report on one of our new projects so when creating the XHTML wireframe/templates, I included some sample SVG graphs, I used the embed tag which worked well but was invalid XHTML strict. I had a look around but everywhere used the embed tag.

[code lang=”xml”][/code]

I thought about and decided to use the object tag,

[code lang=”xml”]

Pie Chart
[/code]

Works perfectly and is perfectly valid :).. Firefox 1.5 SVG support works well but lacks some of the zoom (and other) features of Adobe SVG plugin. I can only presume that it will get better with time, everything else they do does.

Filezilla 2 Cuteftp

I’ve been using Filezilla alot lately but it has been messing up a few transfers (to live servers no doubt) so I decided to try a new FTP client. I hade used CuteFTP Pro before and like it alot. I have a huge list of sites in my Filezilla site manager though and I was not going to re-enter all of them. I had a look at what CuteFTP could import and decided I could convert Filezilla settings to text and then import them to cute ftp…. So I added
[code lang=”xml”]

[/code]
to the Filezilla.xml file which can be found @ “C:\Program Files\FileZilla” (usually) . I then wrote XSLT to transform the xml to text so I could import it.
[code lang=”xml”]









Site Label:
HostName:
Username:
Port:
Default local folder:
Uses passive mode





[/code]

I copied the ouput to a text file and imported it to cute ftp. No passwords mind you but it saved me a lot of time – hope it helps you 🙂

SVN explorer.exe slow down

Over the last few months my SVN working directory has grown to about 11Gb. I use TortoiseSVN client which works great but recently my machine (3GHz P4 with 1.5Gig Ram) started to run super slow any time I accessed a file or tried to browse a directory. I thought I had a virus at first but after running countless scans, I was sure I hadn’t (half scans really as I got bored waiting but I’m confident I didn’t have anything). Some research last night revealed that large working directories can slow down explorer as Tortoise is trying to recursivley look through all the directories to see if any of them are under version control.

You can disable this in TortoiseSVN->Settings->Icon Overlays->disable “Show overlay status icons recursivley”.
TortoiseSVN icon overlay settings

Once I did that, things sped up alot. If down the line it starts to get slow I can dsable icons completely and it should run as explorer should without any TortoiseSVN interference.

I also deleted a ton of directories in my working directory which I wasn’t usng anymore which might have helped as well.

Mono XSP 404

Arghh!!!

I worked form home yesterday as I had the plumber round power flushing the central heating system. I spent most of the day trying to get mono xsp working (on Ubuntu on my ibook) which I did and all the sample .net applications were working great.

Mono XSP 404 ErrorI came in to work today to show my boss what I had discovered and how it could be of use to us… and what do you know mon-xsp stopped working. I cannot fathom what has changed. All I did since it worked was reboot.

I have had a look around but all I found out was that the errors related to compilation errors. I can’t see how this happened as they were compiled yesterday and worked fine, are they recompiled each time??

I have reinstalled mono-xsp2-base, mono-apache-server2, mono-xsp , asp.net examples. Nada same error again The server is run using

/etc/init.d/mono-xsp start

Any ideas? Also anybody know how to get mod_mono installed on Linux PPC without having to recompile apache? and what the hell is apr-config?

Update
After some more playing around I re-installed mono-mcs package. I had more recent package over the ubuntu default which messed things up seemingly. Reverting to the ubuntu version solved and it and I am now serving up .Net applications on Linux on Mac 🙂

What a pillock

Damn Dan Brown and his “The DaVinci code“. This morning I started to get an earlier train as they have changed the timetable, meaning it is dark when I get to Abergele. With it being dark and the fact that I was so engrossed in my book, I missed my stop. I jumped out of my chair “Bollocks” just as we pulled away. I managed to get a train back from the next station but man do I feel a pillock.

OSX and Ubuntu- dual boot

After playing around with Ubuntu Live (PPC) on my ibook, this weekend my mission was to get OSX and Ubuntu dual booting on my ibook. Here’s how it went.

  1. Backup some of my important Docs and data from my existing OSX install
  2. Start clean install of OSX, creating 3 partitions, one shared, one for OSX and one for Ubuntu
  3. Continue OSX Clean Install
  4. Once OSx is installed insert Ubuntu Install CD
  5. Choose all default options but when it comes to partitioning, dlete the Ubuntu partition you created earlier. go back and choose to use maximum free space
  6. Ubuntu will continue it’s install and will install a boot manager so you can choose between OSX, Ubuntu or CD on boot
  7. To view the files in the shared partition, I used the following
    sudo mkdir /media/share
    and then
    sudo mount -t hfsplus /dev/hda5 /media/share
    I still can’t write to this disk but I am working on it

I now have OSX and Ubuntu running very smoothly alongside each other… let the development begin 🙂

Update
To get the shared partition working you can to sync the two users’ (my OSX user and my Ubuntu user) user ids and group ids (You can change the ID in OSX netinfo manager). Once this was done and the drive was mounted correctly (in /etc/fstab)
/dev/hda5 /media/share hfsplus user 0 0
I could write to the shared drive in both installs but it caused havoc with permission in OSX as the user ID had changed. I reckon I can just give world write access to the drive though and it’ll still work.

Aardvark’d DVD + Karova.com

I bought Fog Creek‘s (Joel on Software) “12 weeks with geeks” DVD about a month ago and it arrived the other day. I was expecting a DVD with plenty of interviews about a software project’s lifecycle. This was not really what I got but what I did get was very entertaining and well worth the few dollars. The DVD followed 4 interns over 12 weeks while they developed Fog Creek’s new remote assistance software CoPilot. It looks like a very well organised workplace with devoted and very intelligent employees (much like Karova really 🙂 ).

KS2.0
Speaking of Karova, we have just released our new Karova Store e-commerce software, branded KS2.0. After weeks and weeks of hard work and tons of test harnesses, we have locked down the code untill we start working on the next release. The Karova.com site was also re-designed for the occasion (Good job Andy and Matt). I don’t appear on the more about Karova yet though :(.