I ran into a bizarre issue yesterday. I had a Publisher 2007 document, with various different text colors utilized, and every time I exported it to PDF (using the 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF) all the colors were lost. I ended up with black and white text.
Submitted by Armin on Thu, 2009-10-15 19:06Everyone has their favorite code editor. Different editors suit different needs, but I personally like two of them currently: SlickEdit and Emacs. Both are extremely flexible and efficient editors offering:
The big difference between SlickEdit and Emacs is that SlickEdit is commercial software and Emacs is open source. If you are on a budget Emacs is a good solution and also lets you run the editor from a console (emacs -nw), which is handy.
Submitted by Armin on Tue, 2009-06-23 20:29If you want to set up a Flash video on your website, and you are using Linux, then this post is for you. I'll cover the steps one by one. Keep in mind that there are many different solutions and I have only documented one.
Submitted by Armin on Thu, 2009-05-28 18:55If you are looking to register an Australian top-level domain (TLD) you have many choices for a registrar and host. Your first stop should be www.whatsinaname.com.au to compare the prices between all the different registrars. Obviously you want to select a registrar and host combination (they may be different) to meet your requirements for support, up-time, cost, and features.
If you already have a host set up (it can be anywhere, not necessarily an Australian host), and you simply want to buy the .com.au TLD and redirect it, I would recommend hostess.com.au. In my experience they were fast and efficient. The signup asked whether I wanted a redirect and what the DNS info was, so there was nothing to configure, and the paperwork (including invoice) was emailed to me within minutes.
Submitted by Armin on Wed, 2009-05-27 18:54Digitally signing a jar file is one step among many before releasing your jar to the world. It can help you identify your program as one that genuinely came from you. It can also make it harder to people to alter the program (although not impossible). I recently went through this process with OBZVault where I integrated signing into the build process (Ant scripts generated by NetBeans).
Firstly you should do some background reading. There is a great article at onjava.com that covers Java vs .NET Security mechanisms. If you are familiar with .NET Security this is a very good intro into the Java world. The tool that does the signing of jars is called jarsigner, and key stores are created with keytool.
Next you need to:
Submitted by Armin on Tue, 2009-05-26 23:08I regularly use Subversion (version control system) along with the Tortoise SVN shell client. I mostly stick to the command line tools, but its nice to have some shell integration occasionally. Tortoise SVN provides this integration well.
Just recently however I noticed a runaway process called "TSVNCache.exe" using up a lot (in my case one whole processor) of CPU cycles. I saw this happen on both Windows XP and Vista. TSVNCache.exe is the Tortoise SVN process that is responsible for all those icon overlays in explorer when you view your SVN repository. The process sits there and scans the status of your files and updates them with appropriate icons to indicate state (i.e. modified, added, etc). For some reason it started misbehaving on my machine and grinding everything to a halt (Tortoise SVN version 1.6.1).
I run my own DNS server for my domain, and today I was trying to figure out why on earth my Ubuntu 8.10 machine would not persist the DNS settings I specified after a reboot.
Having my own DNS allows me to refer to machines on my local intranet via their machine name, not their IP (which is dynamic and allocated via DHCP). Any DNS lookups not on my domain get forwarded to my ISP's DNS. All this works fine for Windows machines on the domain, but Ubuntu wasn't playing nice. Every time I changed the settings via System->Preferences->Network Configuration, the details in /etc/resolv.conf would only stick around until the next reboot; at which time the network manager reset everything.
I initially thought this was an issue with Ubuntu, as threads like this seemed to indicate, but it turns out that the problem was with my DHCP server. I had configured my DHCP server to specify both IP and DNS settings to computers. These settings were overriding those specified on Ubuntu. So all I had to do to fix this was configure the DHCP server to include my DNS server in its list. Thats it, no custom DNS entries required.
Submitted by Armin on Wed, 2009-04-22 23:54How many times have you used your code editor to look for some text and either didn't find what you were after, or worse yet - were told that it's not there when in fact it was? I bet this has happened to us all at some stage, and after some struggle you master the editor and life goes on, however I want to go over some basic tools/commands that you can always fall back to.
One of the most useful is searching through files. In the windows world you should all know about findstr. In particular the following variation:
findstr /snip /c:"string to look for" *.cpp
If you have used good source control systems such as subversion or perforce, you will know that adding a whole pile of files (as you would at the beginning of a project) is a trivial task. In the case of subversion it's just two commands, svn add, svn commit, and you are done. If however you have the misfortunte to have to use IBM Rational Clearcase you are a little out of luck.
So before you go and start adding the two hundred files one by one using cleartool mkelem, take a look at this option:
clearfsimport -nsetevent -recurse c:\tmp\srcfolder\new c:\views\destination_view_folder\srcfolder
Video output to an external monitor is easy right? Well it was on Windows XP, but with Xubuntu (8.04 Hardy Heron) running on an IBM Thinkpad T41 turned out to be a little trickier than hitting function-F7.
Firstly hitting function-F7 doesn't do anything, even though all the other function buttons (keyboard light, screen brightness, etc) work fine. If you leave the external monitor plugged in, and reboot, you should see the port come to life. Next you run your favourite video player (like VLC) and notice that the video only appears on the laptops LCD display, and not on the external monitor. To solve this simply:
Done. That should switch the video output to the VGA port. To switch back use this:
If you haven't had a chance to look at Xubuntu, you should check it out. It's essentially Ubuntu but with the Xfce desktop manager. Much smaller and faster than Gnome and Kde. Great for old hardware (like my T41).
Submitted by Armin on Mon, 2008-11-10 02:24
