Advogato blog for softkid

XP SP3

Wed, 7 May 2008 11:19:09 GMT

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

Wed, 7 May 2008 11:19:09 GMT

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

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:16:34 GMT

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

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:22:04 GMT

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

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 08:11:07 GMT

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

Wed, 9 Apr 2008 16:14:51 GMT

No Video,
originally uploaded by Artdambuster.

A nice initiative.

Video on Flickr - no thank you.

Wed, 9 Apr 2008 07:13:37 GMT

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

Mon, 7 Apr 2008 13:17:21 GMT

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 ?

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 11:21:54 GMT

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 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 :



toto0:~ # lsb_release -a

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



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.

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.



How do you find groups in linkedin ?
Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:09:17 GMT
I've been a linkedin user for almost two years now. I use it to maintain my resume online, and to keep in touch with people I work with or that I've worked with in the past. I also use it like a global profesionnal  address book - so I don't clutter my phone nor my current address book with entries I'm not using. I've been looking at the other features offered by linkedin, you have question and answers, but I'm usually too late to give a proper answer, someone as probably replied before me. The other feature is that you can belong to groups, I'm a member of Fosdem attendee for instance. I got into the group after finding out that a friend was part of it - then I decided to see if I could fit in more groups and decided to look for groups.

 There is no way I could search for groups in the linkedin interface (and if there is it very well hidden).

The only thing available is a group directory, but I can't even find the group I'm a member of in the directory - which seems to not display all groups.

I've tried serachnig for "group keyword site:linkedin.com" on google but was unable to find groups, the only thing I stumbled on was profiles.

Any idea how I could serch for groups on linkedin ?