Friday, December 24, 2010

VirtualBox and D3D

I have been working with VirtualBox for a while now. Until today, I assumed D3D is enable as I had ticked the box for D3D support while I was installing the Guest software. However today when I was upgrading my VirtualBox to 4.0, I came across this error message said I couldn't enable D3D supports as I weren't in Windows Safe Mode. After Google this error, I now realize that in order to get D3D to work, I have to install the Guest under Windows Safe Mode. VirtualBox is a great free virtualization solution, however, I am surprised it take this long to include this little error message ... (okay, I admit didn't read the full manual) ...

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Android and its apps

At least I got myself an Android phone (one that the price is not overly expensive) while still have decent hardware and features.

Anyway, the reason I started this post is to list the software that I found useful.

  • K9 Mail - a very nice email client for a variety of supporting protocols
  • arcMedia - a very nice media player (now I wish I have a faster processor)
  • Barnacle WiFi Tether - do I need to say more? (2.2 Tethering works better)
  • Androot - to give you access to parts of system where are usually off the limits
  • ebuddy - all your needs for instant messaging Google talk works better
  • Titanium Backup - to remove stubborn unwanted applications
  • Skype - just be careful with your network charges!

Interviews

I am getting an Interview next week. In order to prepare for it, I googled the common questions used in interviews and I came across this wonder site. If you are in the similar situations as me, you may want to take a look too:

http://www.pohly.com/interview.html

Furthermore, here are the answers for (from http://www.workcoachcafe.com/2007/06/21/job-interviews-whats-your-greatest-weakness/
):

Where do you see yourself in few years time

In the next five years I’d like to see myself here advancing to the next level or at least learning new things and taking on new responsibilities if at all possible.”

Or if it’s a job where learning and advancement are not the goal, then a simple ” I’m happiest when I feel that I’m an essential part of the company I work for – hopefully this one. In the next five years (and hopefully more) I plan to take advantage of whatever opportunities are available – but mostly, I want to do the best I can and know that I’m making a difference.”


What's your grest strength?

* Strong leader
* Good manager
* Initiative (willing to take on new things)
* Follow-through (seeing a task through to the end)
* Good at bringing things in on deadline
* Determination (as in seeing a project through to the end or in finding a solution to a problem)
* Quick learner
* Problem solver
* Flexibility
* Good at seeing the big picture even when dealing with the details
* Good at details, but also know how to see the big picture
* Strong at a given skill required by the job (like Java programming, project management, teaching, writing, web design, customer service, phone manner, math, public speaking, etc.)
* Good people skills
* Good team player
* Ability to help influence change
* Creativity
* Good at finding ways to improve existing business processes
* Good at resolving conflict

Best of luck!

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Samba and Windows 7 Share

Lately I have problems to get my Linux machines to access a shared folder on my Windows 7 system. Today, I finally found the cause of the problems (with the correct magic keywords on Google), Windows Live essentials (http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=84578). As suggested in the forum once I have removed it, everything works fine as before.

Friday, December 3, 2010

about blank

Chrome is nice for using on Netbooks and alike, however it is annoying to have the thumbnails to show up when it starts.

This can be fixed by setting the startup option to show the

about:blank


Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Remote Desktop history

It seems to like a common feature on modern software that record your recent visits to places. However, this can also be an annoying feature as it keeps a trail on where you have been. For instance, the remote desktop keeps a trail of IPs where you have connected to.

Anyway, in order to remove these IPs from the history, open up

~/.local/share/vinagre/history

with your favorite text edit, and remove IPs you don't want. Save the file, and you are done.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Ralink rt3090sta and Ubuntu

I have trouble to get the rt3090sta to work on my Ubuntu. There are many solution, but this one I found is the most easier!

To get it work, you simply create the directory

/etc/Wireless/RT2860STA
Then, create the RT2860STA.dat inside the directory, e.g.
touch RT2860STA.dat

Ralink Wifi Adapter Driver

Recently I had got myself a netbook due to its weight and its bargain price (it was heavily discounted when I got it). Unlike the Asus book I got for my sister which I needed to download a custom driver or two in order to get it fully work, Windows has all its driver for this little things. However, the default Ralink driver for the WiFi network seems a bit flaky after sleep. Hence I decided to install the driver from the Ralink directly. On the same website, you can also find the Linux driver. I have not tried it myself, but newly Ubuntu 10.04 certainly needs it.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Useful software

While I was searching a solution for my indexing problem, I found this blog entry on essential Linux software. I found it useful so I would like to share with you too.

Tracker - bad for your computer!

I have upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 and in general it is very nice. However, in the quest of being more like Mac OS X, Canonical people has put in this nasty feature call indexing. I don't know if it has been there before but it is certainly more noticeable in the new Ubuntu 10.10 as the CPU fan and hard drive have been gone to over drive!

After I found out what was going on, I decided to remove it for good, and here is how I did it.

apt-get purge tracker-*

Then restart, problem solved (my computer is running a lot faster and quieter!)

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Broken Ubuntu 10.10

I have just upgraded my desktop to Ubuntu 10.10 after I have tried it on my laptop. Unfortunately, it wasn't that smooth this time. It seems the nVidia driver for my GeForce MX card is very broken in the new version. I do manage to get the graphical interface back after using the generic driver rather than the propriety driver.

Since I am using a KVM switch, the DPMS didn't quite get detected properly and I were left with this nasty 1024x768@60Hz resolution. One thing that I had kept complaining is how nasty of Linux to configure simple thing as resolution. After a few search, I finally found this blog which describes the use of xrandr to set a custom resolution. After a few attempt, I finally get my 1152x864@70Hz resolution back. Here is the link to the blog if you have a similar problem. Good luck!



By the way, here are the commands I used.

  1. cvt 1152 864 75

  2. xrandr --newmode "1152x864_70.00" 96.75 1152 1224 1344 1536 864 867 871 902 -hsync +vsync

  3. xrandr --verbose --addmode VGA-1 "1152x864_70.00"

  4. xrandr --output VGA-1 --mode "1152x864_70.00"


The changes above is temporary, to make it permanent, you have two options:
1) store these lines onto a file called ~/.xprofile on your home directory to make them permanent for a particular user
2) Modify the /etc/gdm/Init/Default file, and add the lines after right after the

PATH=/usr/bin:$PATH
OLD_IFS=$IFS

p.s. instead of adding the lines directly to the Default file, I chose to create a CustomResolution file with permission sets to 555 , and placed this file in my /usr/local/sbin folder, and called this file from the Default.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Chrome and Linux

I have tried a free browsers such as Firefox, Opera and now Chrome on my Linux laptop (old R40e P4 Celeron 2.0GHz, 1GB), and must say Chrome is the best browser for resources. I like my Firefox for its wealth of extensions, but it often grinds my little laptop to halt for pages littered with excessive Javascripts and Flash adverts. Flash can be dealt with Flash Blocker, but Javascript is a bit hard. With so call Web 2.0, most "modern" websites are using AJAX (J = Javascripts), and turning off Javascript means useless websites. Unfortunately, this is the landscape of current WWW if is not worsen.

I have not scientifically test Chrome against other browsers, but Chrome does handle these websites where others may fail a lot better. However, it isn't without any problems. Firstly, it seems ever stuck to its BETA label, and its updates are more often than the others. You may argue this is good as updates keeps it current, but it is a pain with slow or metered connections, e.g. mobile network. Secondly, Chrome is still relatively new, web programmers are still targeting their sites to IE and Firefox, Webkit based browsers such as Safari, Chrome and others still taking the second seat if not the third. Thirdly, Chrome's link with Google. I don't know if Chrome's search/title bar is still linking to its parent company. It is a bit annoying to know all things you typed are going to be collected and sent back to the bee hive. Last but not the least, Chrome's convenience features. History search may be a good thing for many, but not for myself. I don't like my descriptions of my previous browsed popped up automatically when I typed a new URL. This can be a disaster if you certain types of websites get displayed while you are doing a presentation in front of a large audience. This is also not so good if you are security cautiousness. Personally, I would like to see Chrome more forgetful like Firefox. For example, I would like it to have an option to forget things when it is closed (history, cookies and temp files)

Nevertheless, if you are running Linux on a slow machine and is looking for a full feature browsers, Chrome is a decent choice.

Friday, October 1, 2010

VirtualBox Life Saver

I recently had problem with my OS and had to reinstall the OS from scratch. This caused big problem with my VirtualBox setup as it had serious problem to attach my images as they all had snapshot attached to them. After searching Google, I found this nice little life saver called CloneVDI tool, which allows you to detach an image from its snapshot (at least this was what I did) Okay, I had lost something, but at least I don't need to rebuild everything from scratch. If you are in the similar situation as me, you may want to give this little tool a trial too!

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=22422

Monday, September 13, 2010

Chang IP setting using CLI on Windows

Today I came across a way to set IP details on a Windows machine using CLI, and I just want to share it. For example, you can change the IP of a machine to 10.1.1.2 with subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 and gateway of 10.1.1.1 by:

netsh interface ip set address local static 10.1.1.2 255.255.255.0 10.1.1.1 1

The full usage can be found out by typing below in a command prompt:

netsh interface set interface

Monday, August 9, 2010

Catch the duplicates

One of the problem I have is to find the find and remove duplicate files in my hard drives. Yesterday, I accidentally come across this little utiity called CloneSpy, which allows you to find and remove duplicate files in a number of ways. If you are having the same problems as me, you may want to give CloneSpy a trial and it can be found at http://www.clonespy.com

Update: Easy Duplicate File Finder is another nice alternative (http://www.easyduplicatefinder.com/) too.

Friday, July 30, 2010

Windows 7 ... hidden tasks

Few days ago I came across a site that shows tasks which are scheduled by Windows by default. Some are reasonable, but some are as usual useless. Here are few that I thought are good to be switched off:

AitAgent - Aggregates and uploads Application Telemetry information if opted-in to the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program.

ProgramDataUpdater - Collects program telemetry information if opted-in to the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program

Consolidator - If the user has consented to participate in the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program, this job collects and sends usage data to Microsoft.

KernelCeipTask - The Kernel CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program) task collects additional information about the system and sends this data to Microsoft. If the user has not consented to participate in Windows CEIP, this task does nothing.

UsbCeip - The USB CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program) task collects Universal Serial Bus related statistics and information about your machine and sends it to the Windows Device Connectivity engineering group at Microsoft. The information received is used to help improve the reliability, stability, and overall functionality of USB in Windows. If the user has not consented to participate in Windows CEIP, this task does not do anything.

ScheduledDefrag - This task defragments the computers hard disk drives. (If you are running Windows on a VirtualMachine, I guess this is useless)

WinSAT - Measures a system's performance and capabilities (Why measures it everyday?)

Monday, July 26, 2010

Windows MCE

There is one program that I really like from Microsoft and that is the Media Center. I have been using it since the XP version. For the most part, the XP version is working great after all these years. However, in few areas XP starts to show its ages, and that is in new hardware support and handling.

I have recently got an ATi 4550 card to replace my trouble 8600GT card. This card has HDMI output which should save me from have two cables for carrying video and audio separately. Despite all my attempts, I couldn't get the sound to work as XP would not recognize the HDMI as an output. Since my brother has a similar setup and the sound work well under Windows 7, so I decided to upgrade my XP to Windows 7.

Presto, sound works as it should be plus now I can use my MCE remote to change channels that have successive numbers, e.g. 112. I have this problem for a long time and finally Microsoft has fixed it!!

Friday, July 23, 2010

Data Recovery with PhotoRec

Yesterday I made a mistake to delete an important and have the joy of looking for ways to recover them. After a bit of search, I found this utility called PhotoRec. It seems recover files by searching for file signatures. It worked reasonable well but prepare to give it plenty of time to do it job! It took a whole day (24hrs) to go through my disk to savage files.



In addition, owning one of these can help too

Thursday, July 22, 2010

C# Comments and Doxygen

Similar to Java, you can comment your code using special mark-ups, however, unlike Java, you need to source your own tool similar to javadoc to covert these comments into document pages. There are plenty of such tools for Windows, but for Linux, may I recommend doxygen to you. It is an open source documentation tool for a variety of programming languages, e.g. Java, C/C++/C#, php etc, and it is available through the APT package manager under Ubuntu. You can installed it by running

sudo aptitude install doxygen-gui


This would install the doxygen command line utility plus doxywizard, its graphical tool. To run the wizard, you run doxywizard in a command prompt, and after, you simply follow the simple step by step instructions. Presto, you have a well made documentation in minutes!

Monday, July 12, 2010

64Bit Windows 7 MCE and RMVB

While it is generally great to move to 64bit to take advantage of cheap memory, there is an exception. If you are using Windows Media Center to playback RMVB files, you may want to stay put to the 32Bit version as the 64Bit version cannot use the popular 32Bit Real Alternative DirectShow filter to playback RMVB video inside the Media Center. So, if you have lots of videos in RMVB format and you would like to use Windows Media Center to getting round things, you may want to still with 32Bit a bit longer ... at least till the 64Bit version of Real Alternative is available.

Saturday, July 3, 2010

skype 4 and speed-dial

I have been using the USB-Skype adapter to allow me using my normal house dect phone for skype call for a while. It works great with Skype 3.8. However, skype decided to remove the speed dial from version 4 which is needed for my adapter to work. Hence, until today, I am forced to stay with version 3.

Today, I found a solution for my problem, and it works great. I found this little utility called SkypeSpeedDial which lets you to reveal the hidden speed dial feature in skype 4. You can use it to set speed dial numbers for contacts. To remind yourself the number, I use the rename function to add the speed dial numbers next to the contact names, e.g. John Smith (01)

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Windows 7 and ULi Chipset

When I try to install Windows 7 on my Acer computer which uses ULi chipset, I got no hard drive. It seems Windows 7 does not carry ULi drive, and requires to load ULi drivers manually. After some search on Google, I manage to find the driver at

http://www.4shared.com/file/i1fDjHnr/ULI1575_RAID_F6.html

You simply extract the driver from the archive file and put the extracted file onto an USB pen drive. Load the driver from the USb drive prepared when you reach the empty drive screen. Hope this helps others in a similar situation.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

TraceSource

Yesterday I was trying to get the TraceSource (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228993.aspx) working in C# under mono. I have been following the example in Microsoft website, but nothing seems to work. Today, I finally manage to get the TraceSource working. It turns out that I need to include TRACE as a define symbols in the compiler option (see the image below).



After making this change, my code

TraceSource ts = new TraceSource("DefaultTraceSource");
ts.TraceEvent (TraceEventType.Error, 1, "test");


works perfectly as intended.

Another catch I found with TraceSource is that the switchName attribute in the source element seems to be got ignored. To define the switch level, it seems better to use the switchValue attribute in the source element directly.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

MPC-HC D3DX9.DLL error

When I use the dDirectX output for the Media Player Classic Homecinema, I got the D3DX9 error. A quick search on Google shows that this error can be eradicated by

Step 1. open “C:\Program Files\MPC HomeCinema” with your explorer.
Step 2. Make a copy “ANY” of dll (e.g. mpcresources.fr.dll)
Step 3. Rename the duplication dll to “d3dx9_41.dll”

Full details can be found at

http://hkdennis2k.homeip.net/2009/12/29/simplest-way-to-fix-no-d3dx9-dll-with-mpc-hc-on-windows-7/

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Older ATi Card and Ubuntu

I have been using VESA driver instead of ATi driver for my old IBM Notebook due to the corrupted notification problem in Ubuntu.

Today, I have found the following from the Ubuntu site, which may seem to be the solution for my problem.



With older ATI graphics cards with 32MB or less of video RAM some corruption of direct rendered windows, for example OSD notifier windows, might appear. This may be worked around by disabling 'RenderAccel' in the Xorg configuration. (426582)

To do this first exit to the console using the following command:

sudo service gdm stop

Then create an Xorg configuration file with the command below:

sudo Xorg -configure
Then add the 'RenderAccel' option to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
...
Driver "radeon"
Option "RenderAccel" "off"
EndSection
And restart X/GDM.

sudo service gdm start

Thursday, April 15, 2010

ATi and nVidia

Since the fan on my nVidia card was dying, I got my myself a new ATi 4550 card for my Media Center. It does more or less my old card can do except one thing which is crucial. Although most reviews on the Internet said the differences between the nVidia's Purevideo and the ATi's AVIVO are very little, and in many case ATi solution is recommend due to its passive cooling (silent) and HDMI inclusion, after having both cards, I can say the nVidia's PureVideo is a better option if SDTV is involved.

ATi and nVidia may both handles high definition video very well and can offload works from CPU, however, HD isn't everything! PureVideo has the advantage of deinterlacing SDTV video which ATi lacks. The lack of deinterlacing on ATi card makes live SDTV on my media center look horrible. The "comb" effect is so obvious. Interesting enough, there is a solution, and it is from nVidia. It seems that PureVideo can run on ATi card too. After putting PureVideo back to my computer, the deinterlacing problem solved.

Monday, March 29, 2010

Clear temporary Windows Update installers

If you have problem to update Windows, e.g. it gives you 80072EFE error, it may be worthwhile to clear the Update Installers in your system and restart again. The instructions can be found at:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822798

Especially method 10 which tell you how to empty the software distribution folder.

After you clear the "cached" installers, you may want to restart you system before re-try the update services.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

VirtualBox USB and Ubuntu

I finally manage to get the USB working inside VirtualBox. I followed the instructions from this site https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox/USB, restarted my machine, and like magics, my USB works inside my guest system now!

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Ubuntu and NTFS

It seems that by default Ubuntu does not allow you to format drives with NTFS system. If you want to have more advanced options, you need to install the package ntfsprogs, i.e.

sudo aptitude install ntfsprogs


After the installation, you can format disks with NTFS system and check their "health"

Monday, February 1, 2010

Additional Symbols for Dia

You can find additional Dia symbols at http://dia-installer.de/shapes.html

Sunday, January 31, 2010

PHP Helps

One of my PHP page was giving me hassles, and in order to make my life easy, I use a PHP formatter such as PHP Formatter to format my code for me, and insert comments at the end of each block to help me to see if there are any miss match braces. It works pretty well.

Other toolds I found which can help web coding easier are:
More can be found at http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/07/12/time-savers-code-beautifier-and-formatter/

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Aiptek Tablet and Chinese handwriting recognition

There are many way to type Chinese, however, arguably, the most natural way is handwriting. Windows has handwriting recognition software bundled for a long time now ... and today, I finally find a way to get something similar setup on Ubunut 9.10

Below are the items you need to make it happen.

The tablet I am using is a cheap rebranded tablet that using Aiptek Tablet. By default, Ubuntu can't really make full use of it. To make it useful, you need to

1) install aiptek driver by
sudo aptitude install xserver-xorg-input-aiptek
2) create a 10-linuxaiptek.fdi with the contents as below

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="info.product" contains="Aiptek">
<merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">aiptek</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.SendCoreEvents" type="string">true</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.USB" type="string">On</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.Type" type="string">stylus</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.Mode" type="string">absolute</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.zMin" type="string">0</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.zMax" type="string">511</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.KeepShape" type="string">On</merge>
</match>
</device>

(ref: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AiptekTablet)
3) place the 10-linuxaiptek.fdi into the directory /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/
4) restart the system, and plug in the tablet.

Once you have things setup, you should be able to run the HanziInput.jar, and use the tablet for writing as below.




Add custom checks to Spry

I was working on a web application, and it used Spry for performing client side checking. One of the problem I had was to made the rule for checking one of the textfield input changing dynamically depending on a radio buttons selected by a user previously. Though spry is reasonable good for most part, it seems to be very static.

To get around this problem, here were the steps I used:


1) Change the submit button to plain button, and assign your own form validation function to the onclick event, i.e.
<input type="button" value="submit" onclick="checkform()">
2) Within the checkform() function, do something like the below:

function customValidationFunction(){
// put your own validation functions here.
return true;
}




function checkform(){
var f = document.getElementById("yourformname");
if(
customValidationFunction() && Spry.Widget.Form.validate(f){
f.submit();
}

}


The above would make the form validation process to include your own steps. Now, let's explain how spry shows its errors. Below is a sniplet of html code used by Spry. Spry enable and disable showing off an error message by the adding and removing the class "<error type>Stated" from an element, i.e. <span id="sprytextfield1" class="textfieldRequiredState"> to enable the error message; <span id="sprytextfield1" class=""> to disable the error message

/*Text Field styling classes*/
.textfieldRequiredMsg,
.textfieldInvalidFormatMsg,
.textfieldMinValueMsg,
.textfieldMaxValueMsg,
.textfieldMinCharsMsg,
.textfieldMaxCharsMsg,
.textfieldValidMsg {
display: none;
}
.textfieldRequiredState .textfieldRequiredMsg,
.textfieldInvalidFormatState .textfieldInvalidFormatMsg,
.textfieldMinValueState .textfieldMinValueMsg,
.textfieldMaxValueState .textfieldMaxValueMsg,
.textfieldMinCharsState .textfieldMinCharsMsg,
.textfieldMaxCharsState .textfieldMaxCharsMsg {
display: inline;
color: #CC3333;
border: 1px solid #CC3333;
}
.textfieldValidState input, input.textfieldValidState {
background-color: #B8F5B1;
}
input.textfieldRequiredState, .textfieldRequiredState input,
input.textfieldInvalidFormatState, .textfieldInvalidFormatState input,
input.textfieldMinValueState, .textfieldMinValueState input,
input.textfieldMaxValueState, .textfieldMaxValueState input,
input.textfieldMinCharsState, .textfieldMinCharsState input,
input.textfieldMaxCharsState, .textfieldMaxCharsState input {
background-color: #FF9F9F;
}
.textfieldFocusState input, input.textfieldFocusState {
background-color: #FFFFCC;
}
.textfieldFlashText input, input.textfieldFlashText {
color: red !important;
}
.textfieldHintState input, input.textfieldHintState {
}

<span id="sprytextfield1">
<input type="text" name="mytextfield" id="mytextfield" />
<!--Display an error message>.
<span class="textfieldRequiredMsg">Please enter a description</span>
</span>
Therefore, if you want to include your own error message, you can do something similar. Let us be a bit lazy, and use one of the unused predefined state for our custom purpose. Let's say, we, want to ensure the first letter of the input is a capital letter. To do so, I decided to use the textfieldMaxCharsState for displaying our error message.

<span id="sprytextfield1">
<input type="text" name="mytextfield" id="mytextfield" />
<!--Display an error message>.
<span class="textfieldRequiredMsg">Please enter a description</span>
<span class="textfieldMaxCharsMsg">Your custom error message here.</span>
</span>

Remember earlier, I mentioned that Spry enables and disables the error message by adding and removing the class name from a specific span. We need to do the same in our custom validation function .


function customValidationFunction(){
var elmt = document.getElementById("sprytextfield1");
if(validation is true){
// This would triggers the . textfieldMaxCharsMsg CSS directive alone, and
// hence hides the error message
elmt.removeAttribute("class");
return true;
}else{
// This would triggers the . textfieldMaxCharsState . textfieldMaxCharsMsg CSS directive, and // hence shows the error message
elmt.setAttribute("class", "textfieldMaxCharsState";
return false;
}
}

I hope this tutorial make sense to you. If you found any errors both syntactic or grammatical error, please leave me a comment, so I can correct them.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

zd1211rw gets stuck in 1Mbps

I have this dongle which is using zd1211rw chipset for my wifi connection. However, it seems stuck on 1Mbps with its default set-up. After a search on Google, it seems there is a problem with the current driver implementation, and it won't automatically adjust its transfer rate as it should. A forum suggests the command below to force the speed to 54Mbps.

sudo iwconfig wlan0 rate 54M
You may want to give the above command a try, and see if it helps your speed.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Lock-up and ACPI

I have recently reformatted my old, but perfectly working IBM R40e laptop from Windows XP to Ubuntu. Everything works better than before but it has this annoying lock-up every now and then. One suggestion is to disable the power management (ACPI) by putting the extra setting to the

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi=force pci=acpi"
in the /etc/default/grub file (I am using grub2). Show far, it seems doing the trick. If you are in similar situation, you may want to give this trick a try.

Friday, January 1, 2010

Redirect output and errors to null device

We often write scripts to automate tasks for us, however sometimes we don't want the output from individual programs to clutter the console output. In order to stop programs to output their console output, you can redirect them to the null device as below:

./example.pl > /dev/null 2>&1

This (1) redirects the output of example.pl to the null device and the (2) 2>&1 ensures that the output of the example.pl sends to the standard error (file descriptor 2), to wherever standard output (file descriptor 1) is going, which is, as already established, to the bitbucket.



JDownloader

File site such as Megaupload, hotfile etc are great to share big files but is a pain to download for free account users as they impose certain restrictions and limitations to download operations.

Today, I found this little Java utility that can ease the pain. The program is called JDownloader, which is a download manager which automates the process for you. All you need is provide a link to it, and it will take care the rest. It can even monitor your clipboard for links your copied. Since it is written in Java, you can run it on any platforms.