[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Wireless community camp 2008 - registration
I've just registered myself for the WWC 2008 - I loved so much the 2007 edition - that I am going to attend the last day again. Why do I only attend the last day and not the complete camping week : the answer is quite simple - I just want to participate to the boat trip and capture open networks, or maybe open bluetooth devices.
XP SP3
Just installed windows XP SP3, besides the fact that the install process was long , I liked the fact that after the reboot the first thing I was prompted for was to turn automatic updates ON.
House for Sale
A friend of mine sells his house in leiden the netherlands. Details available on his website at :http://martenvijn.nl/trac/wiki/huis
Auth issues with twittering from jabber
For the last two week twitter@twitter.com has been "offline" in AdiumX. It looks grey - but you can send IM messages to it and that will update your twitts (I'm lhirlimann on twitter; gosh I need to update my foaf file), but you don't get any twitts from people you are following, and you need to log into the twitter website to see them. For a normal user , it looks like the jabber twittering gateway is offline and does not work anymore.This issues just made twitter unusable for me.
Looking around I found this interesting thread : http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/not_receiving_notifications_in_jabber_or_gtalk, with mostly peopel trying to delete the IM interface on twitter and readding it. I tried that a few times - but twitter stayed offline. While trying to get more information I found out that the account was waiting for an auth request - that seemed to never get through.
This morning I booted a machine where PSI was setup and found out that twitter@twitter.com did not appear in PSI's buddy list. So I started the whole add an IM device to your twitter account - and much to my surprised it worked ! So there is an issue somewhere in libpurple - because I also treid to do the same thing from within ichat (which to my knowledge uses libpurple). Issues is I have no idea on how I should properly report the issue to libpurple developers.
Getting rid of IE 7 and getting back to version 6
So you've got a brand new computer with Windows XP installed and you just patch it up to the latest level. When it's done you realize that what you need on your machine is not version 7 of internet explorer but version 6 and you want to revert - or go back to version 6 without screwing your all machine. There is a simple solution but I'm not sure if it works on all installations. if you are lucky enough to have the following file : C:\WINDOWS\ie7\spuninst\spuninst.exe on your machine, you are saved.
Just double click on it and you will be prompted about the fact that IE7 is going to be removed and that a few patches have been applied on top of it. Just tell the machine that you are sure of yourself. IE7 is going to get properly removed from your machine and you will end up in a "clean" install with IE6.
Note that the best way to achieve a nice Internet explorer 6 machine is to reinstall and handy pick the updates that you want to apply on top of service pack two, and make sure you refuse to install version seven of IE.
Apachecon Europe 2008
Yesterday I attended the last day of Apachecon Europe 2008. I listened to a few talks on Hadoop but to my dismay did not learn much at these talks - I would have liked more technical oreinted presentations getting into the guts of using Map/Reduce and HDFS efficiently.
Then I went to the APR presentation prepared at the last minute by Colmmac - because the person that was supose to give the presentation was "missing".
Any how it was a nice days and I had a few conversation with people - and that was really nice. I'll try to attend again next year.
My pictures of the events are here
No Video on flickr
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Video on Flickr - no thank you.
Flickr just annonced that people would be able to post video and share them. And I think it's a bad idea - because you just don't mix videos and photos - it's not the same demographics creating pictures and movies.
The thing that make me use flickr is that I can learn a lot from other and then make better pictures - it's also a show off , where I can tell the world : "hey look how good I amd at making pictures" (and then my ego goes down the drain because nobody else really likes my pictures.). And when I want to buy equipement - or when I decided that I would try to properly geottag my pictures, I just searched flickr and posted a few notes here and there. Same thing when I wanted to shoot RAW and decided to look for raw processing software. Up to now flickr as been a great resource for anything photography related. It's also a great resource when travelling - because you can ask local users what to see in a country, city a- that is worth taking a picture.
If I wanted to get into making videos, I would probably read Eugenia's blog first and then use siet that are dedicated to videos - because the community is already there - and people doing video are not the same as those taking pictures. I'm for sure not going to use flickr to view or post videos - I hope a majority of users will do the same and flickr will reconsider it's offering.
How to have tabs in IE 6
I've just noticed that my Internet Explorer 6 had tabs at work. I'm pretty sure that the original IE 6 does not have tabs. So how did I manage to add this feature in my IE 6 installation ?
I just tried IE 8 beta one on that machine - which was still running IE 6 for testing puposes. Then I decided to see if I could go back to my original IE and asked windows to deinstall version 8. To my surprise the uninstaller was present and did not really say no to deinstall. uninstall wen fine and I frist checkjed that IE was back to version 6.
It just took me a while to realize that I had gained tabs in the UI.
What version of Linux is my machine running ?
Today I needed to report a bug on a piece of software that ran on a linux system. The bug report form asked for a version of the system I was running. On traditional unix system (By these I mean Solaris, HP-UX, Aix), I would run toto0:~ # lsb_release -a As one can see the lsb_release command is the command to figure out which version of linux and which distribution your system is running.uname -a and the third or fourth argument would be the os name and version. Done I could report my OS version number. I could always run a few other command that would be specific to learn a bit more about the version - but uname -a would give me the information straight away.
so on my Ubuntu system it gave me :
ludo@toto:~$ uname -a
Linux toto 2.6.22-14-server #1 SMP Tue Dec 18 05:52:24 UTC 2007 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Which did not help a lot. After poking a bit I found the following, each distribution as a file in /etc which gives this information :
etc/redhat-release
etc/SuSE-release
etc/gentoo-release
etc/yellowdog-release
etc/mandrake-release
etc/whitebox-release
etc/debian_version
As Ubuntu is a debian derivative it uses the etc/debian_version file - but this might not be enough, the real nice command to run is lsb_release. On OpenSuse this gives :
LSB Version: core-2.0-noarch:core-3.0-noarch:core-2.0-x86_64:core-3.0-x86_64:desktop-3.1-amd64:desktop-3.1-noarch:graphics-2.0-amd64:graphics-2.0-noarch:graphics-3.1-amd64:graphics-3.1-noarch
Distributor ID: SUSE LINUX
Description: openSUSE 10.3 (X86-64)
Release: 10.3
Codename: n/a
and on Ubuntu it gives :
ludo@toto:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 7.10
Release: 7.10
Codename: gutsy
To be complete on AIX the command that gives you more information is oslevel. On Mac OS X it's sw_vers. I currently can't recall what it is for sun, nor for HP-UX.
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