Peter’s Ponderings

I’ve moved my Schutzhund wall project info onto its own series of pages. Here is a link to them:

http://pavlovich.org/musings/?page_id=122

I just installed IEs4Linux on my Ubuntu 8.04 development VM. This was as painless an install as I’ve ever had. I started with the step-by-step document available here:

http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Installation:Ubuntu

For your convenience, here are the instructions provided there:

1) Open a terminal

2) Open /etc/apt/sources.list

 sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

3) Uncomment (or add) following lines:

 deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu edgy universe

4) Add this line:

 deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt edgy main

5) Close gedit. Update and install wine and cabextract:

 wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install wine cabextract

6) Download IEs 4 Linux and install

 wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
 tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
 cd ies4linux-*
 ./ies4linux

The only thing I changed was that I simply typed in the following instead of doing all of wget installs of those two packages:

sudo apt-get install wine cabextract

That worked nicely for me. I then followed the rest of the instructions and everything went swimmingly. Now I can test my web artistry on Firefox and IE while in Linux. NICE !!!

Update: If you do as I suggest above, everything seems to work fine. However, when you start up the IEs4Linux install script it complains about an “old” version of wine. I dismissed the warning and everything went swimmingly. However, the warning did say that there might be some issues since the latest version of IEs4Linux expects the latest version of wine to be installed.

I plan to re-do the install following the “wget” route for wine (as specified on the wine site) and see if the results were any different. This site says to do the following to install the latest version of wine:

First, open a terminal window (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). On Debian, you will need to open a root terminal. Then add the repository’s key to your system’s list of trusted APT keys by copy and pasting the following:

wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Next, add the repository to your system’s list of APT sources:

For Ubuntu Hardy (8.04):
sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

For Debian Etch (4.0):
sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/etch.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

Then update APT’s package information by running ‘sudo apt-get update‘.

If you are using Ubuntu, you can now install Wine by clicking this link. Alternatively, you can install by going to Applications->Add/Remove and searching for Wine.

The nice thing about the way I did it is that you can actually script this install as part of your standard machine prep script since there is no specific reference to the version of ubuntu that you are running (i.e. hardy heron as is found in the instructions on the wine site).

Add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc file:

shopt -s histappend
PROMPT_COMMAND=”$PROMPT_COMMAND;history -a”

The first one sets the history to “append mode” rather than “over-write” mode and the second one appends each command to the history file immediately (rather than waiting until the end of your shell session to update it as it would normally do).

A while back, I attended a NEJUG Spring SIG presentation made by Oracle on its new Coherence product. This product is an implementation of an in-memory cache (now known as a “data grid”). Although there are a number of holes in the implementation, there is much promise in this technology and it is worth a look. Check it out by clicking here.

Note that the other big player in this space is GemStone’s GemFire. This product is based on the GemStone in memory cache system that was used in their Object Database product line for 20+ years. Understandably, it is more mature with more of the “holes” covered. You can see info on GemFire here

The following are links to some interesting/useful info related to JSF

Live demo of richfaces GUI components
Comparison matrix for various JSF libraries

I’ve seen this error fairly consistently when attempting to start VMs on Windows-based host machines. I found a few posts on the web in various places (see below for reference links) on how best to fix this issue.

The gist of the solution is to simply make a registry edit on your host machine to prevent Windows from issuing error messages related to disk availability issues.

Here is an excerpt from a Microsoft site posting which details the change to make and explains what the “fix” does:

Using regedit, set “Value” = 2 for the ErrorMode key which can be found here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Windows

• The value of 2 instructs the Windows NT operating system to avoid popup messages for any hard error on the system and return the default error condition to the calling process.
• This registry key is always checked before any hard error is received. Therefore, you do NOT have to restart the system after changing the key value. You can immediately reset the key back to 0 if any unexpected side effects occur. NOTE: No matter what the setting of the registry value, the CSRSS.exe process always logs the message details to the Windows NT Event Log.

For more info see:

• VMware community message
• Microsoft reference page

Greetings to the world!

I’ve given up trying to keep notes either hard copy or electronic. Nothing seems to fit the bill for ease of use, ease of access and search-ability. So I thought I’d try blogging. Perhaps this will be the answer

I can’t promise that what I will write here will be useful, entertaining or even worth the time it takes to type it. Nonetheless, I shall go forward with the faith that it will be what it will be.

I plan to use this primarily for keeping track of technical goodies that I discover or develop as well as categorizing useful (or useless ) information and links for future reference. I may fool myself into thinking that someone might actually read this blog and be completely fascinated by my life and thus persuade myself to keep track of what I am currently up via posts to this blog. We shall see how much fee time I have and whether I can be that gullible.

If you have read this intro and still want to read on, well, you are a braver person than I am and my hat’s off to you!

Happy reading adventurer and God Speed!

Best regards,

Peter.