TheNitai

So true

http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/

So far, installing SUN Java versions have always been a bit of a “pain” under Linux. Well, as I said, when you need SUN’s Java version that is. Most of the time you need to go to their intuitive (fun intended) download page and think very hard which version to download.

Ubuntu has made this step a bit easier. Actually, all there is to it, is the following:

1. Add the required partner repository

Under Ubuntu 10 you have to edit the file “/etc/apt/sources.list” and uncomment the partner entires (See screen shot below).

2. Update your repository

This is a simple one. Issue the command “apt-get update” and off you go.

3. Install Java

Now all there is for you to do is to install Java with “apt-get install sun-java6-jre”.

Now, anyone please tell me that Linux is hard to handle

The other day I set out to finally start synching one of my backup folders on one of our Ubuntu Servers with Amazon S3. The reasons for this, are obvious. Amazon S3 is very cheap and reliable and is a good fit for keeping “smaller” chunks of files as a backup storage. So, apart from writing a script that runs trough crontab, which was easy to write, I’ve spent far more time to get the S3 script running. So, here are the steps to sync any folder with Amazon S3.

First off, I created a additional bucket on S3. Let’s call this backup “mybackup”.

Since, I did not wanted to install anything additionally to run the S3 scripts (there is a very popular S3Rsync for Ruby out there) I wanted to get it running with the “bash” shell itself. Why install another language, if you got everything already, right?

So, I went ahead and downloaded the S3-bash scripts. As the name implies, these are scripts that work in the bash shell and nothing else is needed for it. Unfortunately, the documentation lacks big time, so I had to run all over the net to find some. Since they are very sparse, here are the steps to get it running.

After you have unpacked the scripts you get three scripts called;

• s3-get – for getting files from S3
• s3-put – for putting files on S3
• s3-delete – for deleting files on S3

Since we want to put files on S3, we are going to focus on the “s3-put” script. Here is a example how the commands for the s3-put script would look like:

s3-put -k {yourkey} -s awssecretfile -T /backup/myfile.zip /s3-backup/myfile.zip

The explanation of the params is as follows:

• -k
  The “-k” parameter is your Amazon S3 key
• -s
  The “-s” parameter is a path to a file (which you have to write) which contains your Amazon S3 secret key. Please read further down, in order to avoid any errors with this.
• -T
  The “-T” parameter should be the absolute path to your file that you want to out on Amazon S3
• file bucket and path on S3
  Last but not least, you have to pass the path to your S3 bucket and the file name to the command string.

Now, that wasn’t so hard right? Well, there is one small thing that drove me crazy during my initial setup. That is that the file with my Amazon S3 secret key kept on throwing an error. Somehow the length was not matching and some other errors. After some digging around I figured that one has to write to the file again in order to get rid of the 41 bytes error message. To do that issue the following command:

cat awssecretfile | tr -d '\n' >> awssecretfile-new

Right, so I’m hoping this helps anyone out there. Have fun.

No no, I haven’t converted to the “other side”, but I had the need to extend my Windows Server 2008 VMWare image from 20GB to 40GB. Extending the virtual disk was a piece of cake (thanks to VMWare) but extending the disk on Windows Server 2008 was kinda “difficult” until I found the following description.

The reason why you can not simply extend the startup volume of your Windows server is that it won’t allow you to extend the startup volume in the GUI tool of the Administration under the disk management application. Fortunately, the engineers added this option in the command line tool “diskpart” since Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2. These versions of Windows ship with a more enhanced version of diskpart.exe that supports partition extension for bootable disks.

In order to extend your startup volume you have to do the following;

Open a Command Prompt and type: diskpart

Type: list volume

Remember the volume number (#) of your volume!

Type: select volume (the number from the above step)

Type: extend

This is it and you don’t even have to reboot. How about that for a change

Most of you probably remember the UI of the movie “Minority Report”. We all thought that this would be way cool to interact with our machines like that. Well, good news. The future of the UI is here. The makers of the movie did not only show us what could be done, but also allowed the guys to develop it.

In the below talk, John Underkoffler demoes the UI he and his team has been working on and compares it to the same revolution that once the Macintosh set off when it was introduced. I especially like the quote: “I think it is time that we ask the same of technology. Technology is capable off, expressing and being {…} with a certain generosity. And we need to demand that…”

I just run into an issue where the form was submitted with Firefox (despite an error), but the page stopped loading under Google Chrome. With the help of FireBug I saw that there was a Javascript error with the message “too many recursions”.

This is the code that I had which caused too much recursion:

$("#formsignup").validate({
  submitHandler: function(form) {
  // Submit
  $('#formsignup').submit();
}, ...

According to a FAQ buried on the plugin page of Jquery I found that (quote); This results in a too-much-recursion error: $(form).submit() triggers another round of validation, resulting in another call to submitHandler, and voila, recursion. Replace that with form.submit(), which triggers the native submit event instead and not the validation.

Low and behold, I changed my code to the following and it works.

$("#formsignup").validate({
  submitHandler: function(form) {
  // Submit
  form.submit();
}, ...

Hope this helps someone else out there.

I’ve been a vegetarian all my life and so it comes natural for me. I have never had the desire to eat meat, thus the discussion, why it is difficult to stop eating meat is hard to understand.

But as it seams, there are a lot of people who understand why being a vegetarian is a good choice (environment, health, etc.) but they have difficulties to follow. Here Graham Hill talks about a way of doing it, which could work for you too.

Give 5 minutes of your day to his talk, you own it to mother earth. Let me know if it works for you.

Filmed inside Cambridge University’s anechoic chamber (designed to create total silence) and featuring former Guantanamo Bay detainee, Ruhal Ahmed, this short by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin is a reflection on Ahmed’s experiences whilst in detention (particularly how he was interrogated using high-volume music) and about the use of human sound on the body.

www.zerodb.org [music against torture]

Given gMail has one of the best web application interfaces (for its usage) and can sit happy in your browser tab, it is after all still a web application and can not interact with your local address book, offers no drag and drop possibility and desktop notifications.

Furthermore, Gmail offers some really useful features like threaded conversation view, saving of chats, starred items and archives. Features that anyone who has used Gmail for more then one day has come to love and cherish. Since, those functions are just so useful many are just using Gmail in the browser, after all it is free and it works.

Still, I set out for a quest to find a desktop client and an iPhone app for gMail for the obvious reasons mentioned above and… …to say upfront, I found (for me) the perfect Gmail experience on the Mac and on the iPhone. So, read on…

Synching
We as Mac users like our iCal and our Address Book. They might not be the perfect solutions, but to be honest, they are the best we have and they come with MacOS X and are tightly integrated with the system. Thought, Apple made some improvements to iCal (adding WebDAV) and subscribing to other calendars it does not come close to experiences that some have with Outlook and Exchange server. Let’s not even talk about the Address Book which is somehow closed in itself (yes, I know you can lookup LDAP, but does a private person have LDAP installed?). What we (I) really want is to have a easy synchronization of my Calendar (iCal) and my addresses (Address Book) with Gmail. It is not too much to ask, right?

The desire to do so, is fortunately not only mine, but also that of the developers of SpanningSync. In short, SpanningSync allows you to sync your address book and calendar(s) (yes, more then one) with your GMail contact/calendars. Best of it all, you don’t have to do anything at all to make it work, simply install it, set it up once and forget it. From then on SpanningSync, syncs everything in the background for you.

For me, not one thought crossed my mind not to get it. They offer an annual license or a onetime license.

iPhone & gMail

Besides browsing to the mobile gMail site within Safari and then save it as a book mark site (which then appears as a custom app on the iPhone) there are two gMail applications, one is called iGmail and the other Mailroom.

Honestly, I have been using iGmail for some time and even slashed out $5 for having it work with my Google App account. But recently I experienced random lockouts, as such that I could not login anymore (even after restarting the phone) and once I was able to re-login I experienced random crashes. Another thing is that on slow connections (like on EDGE) the application did not work at all. Obviously, I was looking for an alternative.

Today, Mailroom had gotten the top spot on my iPhone. Mailroom is by far the best gMail application and works every time I have to use it, be it on a slow network or not. Mailroom does even more then the “normal” gMail mobile site. Some of the things are;

• Multiple Accounts
• Threaded Messages
• Using Local Address Book
• Offline Support

Personally, I don’t regret for once second that I bought Mailroom. It works every time and does what it promises.

Desktop & gMail

Of course, you can have your Apple Mail set up with gMail over IMAP (recommended) or POP3, but for me Apple Mail does not work so well. I like the gMail interface, but still want the desktop feeling and the convenience of attaching any document by drag/drop. The only application that offers me all that is Mailplane. I can’t say anything else, then that Mailplane does all the things you are accustomed to from a desktop application and some more. That and the user interface from gMail makes it a clear “must have” for any serious gMail user.

Some of the benefits of using Mailplane are;

• Having notification (Growl)
• Drag & Drop attachments
• Having different account and switch to them on the fly
• Individual formated signatures for each account
• Access to Address Book
• Create screen shots within Mailplane
• etc.

The Conclusion

Having a perfect workflow in sync with gMail, MacOS X and iPhone is something that can easily be achieved with the outlined tools above. For me, my current set up works flawlessly for many months now and supports me 100% in my work. In short, I use SpanningSync for having my calendar and address book in sync with gMail, iCal and Address Book. On my iPhone I got Mailroom and on MacOS X I use Mailplane.

This YouTube Video is just too good to pass on. As a big Star Wars fan (I guess, I watched the first one 50 times at the movies) this is a must see. And if you don’t know Star Wars (well you know, the Avatar generation) then it is a must see, so you can talk with the big boys.