john.parnefjord.se Reflections & findings

Last time I downloaded the latest version of Eclipse, in this case Gallileo, I choose to download the version Eclipse for PHP developers. For my concern I mostly work with Python and PHP so by adding the PyDev extension I was up running quite soon. But the other day I needed to run an ANT script, that I use to generate documenation, and noticed that the Run as... context menu didn't show up ANT as an option.

Had this annoying message popping up when running a script on Ubuntu 8.0.4 LTS. The message read:

shift: N: can't shift that many

On Debian it works fine. The reason for this is the use of different shells in Debian and Ubuntu. Debian is using bash and Ubuntu is using dash. Check the symlink /bin/sh on the different distributions.

To reproduce save the following to a file named test_shift.sh:

This is just a reminder to myself after trying to do a factory reset of Android on a Samsung Galaxy.

The wrong way: trying to boot the phone in recovery mode and choosing to format data. After reboot all data were intact.

The solution was to power on the phone and go to Settings -> SD Card & Phone Settings -> Factory Data Reset. After that operation the phone was clean.

// John 

Last week I've ordered the multi-talented music system NAS-Z200IR, as Sony nicely named it. It's just one flat panel with loud speakers and remote control with 3.5 inch LCD screen. You can plug your Ipod to the system, an USB-stick, play internet radio, ordinary FM/AM-radio. It is actually that ancient that it still can play CD:s, if you recall what they look like.

Assume that you have a movie in flash video but you want to convert it to another format, say mpg, to be able to play on more devices. On Ubuntu/Debian this is quite easy to achieve. Start with installing the necessary packages (two steps in order to decrease line length).

sudo aptitude install libavcodec-unstripped-52 libavdevice-unstripped-52 libavformat-unstripped-52 
sudo aptitude install libavutil-unstripped-49 libpostproc-unstripped-51 libswscale-unstripped-0 ffmpeg 

So to convert just run:

I've played a bit with Google App Engine lately and I must say that the service is really nice.

Anyway, today I ran into a problem that I couldn't pinpoint straight away. I had done some changes to my toy application http://x-libris.appspot.com/ and deployed it as usual as everything worked just fine locally. But in production environment some pages just crashed with Server Error 500.

I had a need for a favicon for a new prototype search site that I've developed and ended up on the excellent site http://favicon.cc/. As I searched for favicons I found a game, Defender of the Favicon, that is played in a favicon. Amazing! Check out the game here:

http://www.p01.org/releases/DEFENDER_of_the_favicon/

Häromdagen sjösatte jag ett litet hobbyprojekt som jag pysslat med under december och januari, X-Libris. Upprinnelsen till tjänsten var att jag ville bekanta mig mer med JQuery, BluePrint CSS Framework och Google App Engine. När det visade sig att Libris tillhandahåller ett API för sökning där resultatet kan levereras i lite olika format, såsom MarcXML, MODS, JSON m fl, så besämde jag mig för att bygga en AJAX-baserad söktjänst.

I found out about the Blueprint CSS framework the other day and it seems really cool. The framework uses a grid layout as its base with 24 columns and as many rows as needed. Columns and rows can overlap, much like ordinary tables in HTML. Just like the YUI CSS, Blueprint CSS resets the browsers stylesheet rendering so that different browsers will render the layout the same.

I have to say that Apache Solr is an amazing product. If you reached this post you probably run or heard about it before, if not head to http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ to read more about it. It's just wonderful to see what the open source community can achieve.