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Recently been researching and testing with VMware images for the deployment of our application at work which turned out to work pretty well (Ubuntu + Java 6 + MySQL + Glassfish). However, one thing which became bothersome was the overgrowing .vmdk images which didn’t seem to reduce in size even after file deletions were made in the virtual disk itself.

Again, Google came to the rescue for this, linking me to this site which gave a 2 step process for doing the shrinking. Do note that the instructions are for those who are using Windows as their host OS.

      

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Got a “java.lang.InternalError:Can’t connect to window server” while trying to get Glassfish up and running on a Mac G5 running Mac OS X recently at work which was pretty odd as our application and Glassfish do not fire up any GUIs. After some googling, problem was fixed by adding a ‘-Djava.awt.headless=true’ to the list of system variables.

Although it was fixed relatively easily, it seems rather odd that Java would actually try to access the X server even though I was running it through a SSH terminal window (PuTTY)..

      

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If you’re developing in Java and have not used Eclipse before, you don’t know what you’re missing out. :)

Probably would test out the Web Tools project of the Europa release as web services and distribution seems to be my domain at work in recent times..

      

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I decided to use AJAX calls to get the browser to make keep-alive calls every 2 minutes (using setInterval) and somehow stumbled into an issue where it makes the call once, and then stops. After talking the Javascript and Flash god in the office, we found out that it was because the script goes out of scope and thus stops looping as it should.

A quick fix for this can be found here. It’s been working for me without any adverse effects since. ;)

      

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Came across quite a few recently..

• Introduction to abject-oriented programming
• Linux funnies
• Asshole driven development

      

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That was the error code which I encountered while trying to install Python on the server at work which ran on Windows Server 2003. The installer actually executed but threw that ’setup file could not be found’ error just after selecting the destination directory for the install. Initial googling for this gave results which were along the lines of ‘clean the CD as it may be dirty’ didn’t make much sense since it was being installed from the hard disk itself!

Mr sysadmin AsenDURE didn’t have an answer for it either, so I went back to do more googling which one of them actually fixed it. Although the installer (msi) file was on the hard disk locally, it was in a network share which Windows Server 2003 disapproves of. After moving the file to an unshared directory, the install process was completed without any issues. That’s Windows I guess. ;)

Another thing which I’ve learnt after the first week is not to run services/applications which were built for *nix on Windows. I had heaps of problems in migrating CVS to SVN which would never have been an issue had it been a *nix box.

      

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AsenDURE messaged me on MSN yesterday about having a search plugin for any site integrated into Firefox. After having a look at it, I gave it a shot and now this site has a search plugin which you can install into Firefox 2.0 and search directly from the search bar. ;)

Following the steps from here, your currently selected search plugin (by default Google) would glow blue when it automatically detects a search plugin. And the following screenshots on how to add and use it are rather self explanatory.

Adding it:

Using it:

There should be a 16×16 icon image for it, but I don’t have one for it now though. ;)

      

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As posted by Han Kern earlier, we finally got spherebox completed 2 days ago. All credit to him for the writeups. ;) This page should be a good start if you’re wondering what it is all about.

For those interested in the nitty-gritty technical details, the site was designed based on a WordPress installation with numerous changes to the CSS and templates of the theme it’s based on (MistyLook). WordPress Codex was an excellent resource for all the stuff I did and has everything categorised pretty well.

As expected, IE decided not to display some things as how the other 2 browsers displayed it (stuff just above the header images were misaligned or got ‘covered’ by the image below it) and I chose to use the conditional comments method to get around this. The site now shows up appropriately in Firefox 1.5, IE 6 and 7, Opera 9 on Windows.

      

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About a month ago, I got some old computer parts from Kah Wai which weren’t in use and set up a headless server using the latest Ubuntu server edition. I stumbled upon this guide which was excellent in guiding me through the process of setting it up and I would highly recommend it if you are new to setting up a server from scratch.

I’m pretty impressed by the Debian derived package management system which makes it very easy to add, remove or update almost any application available for it. I remember the times when I had to deal with all sorts of dependency errors when attempting to install stuff on Mandrake 9.0 (now called Mandriva). Besides the server services such as Apache, PHP, MySQL, I got Samba installed as well so it’s now also functioning as a dump box besides its primary function as a development server (not much so recently though..). :D

      

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Pretty true to a certain extent. :P

via digg

Coincidentally, I found another pic lying on my hard disk of a similar vein:

I do not wish to prove this true during the usability testing session with my project’s client in 2 days time though.. It’s going to be a pain if that happens. XD

      

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