We all know Kathy Sierra. Author of … (did you know the answer?). And maintainer of “Creating Passionate Users“. She’s has cancelled her presentations on ETech. Read here why. What has this world come to? Why can’t people respect one another?
Kathy, all the best to you. Not all people are like the trolls you mention. Most of the world is a good place. But like those in prison, some of us should be refrained from “free speech”, since they obviously can’t handle the “free” part.
I know how to set the DISPLAY variable. I know how to “export” the variable. And I did. Still when starting
runInstaller -ignoreSysPrereqs
the installer would barf on me with a:
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError
and a big Java stacktrace. Googling around didn’t solve much. I tried installing (and removing) several old X-libs, and checked several other things, but nothing worked. Finally I opened up the install-manual (eeks), and went straight to the section of actually running the installer. It tells you about the DISPLAY variable, and how to check whether it works as specified. So I also gave the command:
xclock &
To my surprise, it returned an error: can’t open display. WTF? I double checked my environment variable and noticed I forgot the colon. Silly me. But silly installer as well. Why not give a reasonable equivalent of “can’t open display”?
…to our new house. So it’s finally ours. The bathroom will be smashed to pieces from tomorrow on, and the guys plan to be finished by the end of next week. We haved planned our removal at April, 16th, unfortunately the kitchen won’t be started/done by then, so we will have some mess when already living there. I will post some pictures here when I’m less tired then I am now.
The WordPress admin panel (especially the Sidebar widgets) rendered incorrectly on FireFox, thereby making the interface useless. I tried disabling scripts for my domain, but that made things worse. After re-enabling scripts, the page now looks and functions fine. Very strange, but back to FireFox for now.
Perhaps NoScript had an update?
Today I updated my Outlook Unsafe Attachment Unlocker utility. For some reason I noticed the select-all checkmark did not toggle. It only did a Select-All, but not an Unselect-All. Now it does. And the context-menu now points to the correct address of this weblog. Get it here.
When I get my hands on an Office 2007, I’ll see whether the utility can be made Office 2007 compatible.
Opera uses it’s own plugins, but when detected, also FireFox plugins. To get Flash working in Opera, I deleted ALL libflash* from /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins, and from /usr/lib/opera/plugins. Then I downloaded the .tar.gz version of Adobe’s Flash player and unpacked the tarball. Next I started the flashplayer_installer. It basically copies some files to your own FireFox plugins directory. Go there and copy the files to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugin. Verify taht things are working in both FireFox and Opera now.
Sun released milestone 7 of Netbeans 6. Download here.
Just a couple of minutes ago, I wanted to change something in the widgets of this blog. Since I use the BinaryBlue-theme, you go to the WordPress administration panel, and then choose the Sidebar Widgets option. You then get a left-right division with on the left the available widgets and on the right the widgets you are currently using. You can drag-and-drop them. And every widget has a “configuration” icon. Not on Ubuntu’s FireFox (2.0.0.2). The first available widget has an icon that does not work properly and somewhere in the upper-right corner (totally out of place) is another icon that does nothing. I restarted FireFox, reloaded the admin-page, but still not correct. Strange, since FireFox on Windows renders this correctly.
I started Opera, went to the same admin-page, and things work like they should. Back to Opera again…
Since my Windows-system (the system disk) crashed, I had no Windows anymore on my PC. After installing Ubuntu, I could mount my NTFS-partitions, but only in read-only mode. Trying to mount them in read-write mode resulted in errors, because “the NTFS logfile is unclean”. There are tools for Linux that can set a flag in the NTFS-partitions, that will be recognized by Windows so that it will perform a chkdsk on that disk on the next reboot. The only problem was: I have no Windows anymore.
> Enter VMWare Server.
I installed VMWare Server, the free edition that can be downloaded from VMWare’s site (an “apt-get install xinetd -y” could be necessary). Since I own a legal Windows XP Pro copy, I installed that into a VMWare guest-OS, and started it. Worked great. Powerdown, modify the VMWare configuration to include the physical disks (for advanced users only) that contained the NTFS-partitions. Restart the guest-OS again, and voila, explorable extra disks. Shutdown Windows properly and the partitions are once again in a clean state. Mounting them in Ubuntu is now a piece of cake.
VMWare is an invaluable piece of software. I own a legal (prehistoric!) “Workstation 3.0” that I used on my laptop to go to clients and being able to work on my machine with their Windows. Great software!
Being on the housing market since July last year, it is finally happening: a new house and a mortgage to pay for it. If things go smoothly, we will be moving somewhere in April. Don’t worry, I won’t leave Rotterdam!