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            <p>Tried to sign an applet and ran into an error:</p>
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There is no magic in jarsigner.

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            <p>I am about to build a new house. The architect that I hired to design it is a dud. True he has come up with a pretty good design, which will be easy on the eye (hopefully) and practical. However the design is structurally not very good. Unfortunately I came to realize this only after the plan was passed onto the structural engineer.</p>
            <p>It's really all my fault, I know enough about physics, applied math and concrete to have spotted it, but I didn't. That's why I am not a structural engineer! but now that my eyes have been opened, I wanted to try my hand at coming up with my own design. As for the architect, he doesn't want to admit that his structure is unsound.</p>
            <p>Well the trouble with my drawing my own plan is that I don't have CAD tool. the limited number available for linux are either too complicated or too limited. Then I came up with a good page on <a href="http://architecture.about.com/cs/cadprograms/tp/designsoftware.htm">about.com</a> that listed 10 good CAD software. Unfortunately none of them are available for linux. But who cares? I have <a href="https://www.winehq.org">wine</a></p>
            <p>Unfortunately some of them failed to install and others failed to run (most notably turbo cad). At first I thought this was a shortcoming of wine but found it was a shortcoming of the software in question when I tried the same on a Windows computer. Of the few that remained many were again found to be too complicated or too trivial.</p>
            <p>The most impressive of the lot was without a doubt google sketch up. Unfortunately it's a wee bit more complex than I bargained for. The one that is really suited for the task at hand is <a href="http://www.blackmtnsoft.com/">Fast Plan</a>. But there is a show stopper in that software. They have forgotten to add redo/undo buttons. What a great way to kill a great software.</p>
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CAD and houseplans.

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            <p>Sri Lanka Telecom is a poor excuse for a telecom company. One of the reasons that Sri Lankan ICT infrastructure is lagging so far behind is because SLT used to enjoy a monopoly for such a long time. Even today they have a near monopoly in certain fields. DSL is one of them.</p>
            <p>The <a href="http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/blog/archives/000810.html">ADSL connections provided by SLT</a> are pathetically slow (512Mb/s download) but downloads rarely proceed at those speeds. 100Mb/s is more like it. Being an ADSL user mean you often have to rely on their SMTP servers for sending mail. Sure you can use your own but if you try to send a large mail, you invariably see an error. That doesn't mean using SLT's own outgoing server is any better.</p>
            <p><img alt="" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/slt-mail.gif"></p>
            <p>This was the error that was popping up sometime ago when you attempt to send mail. If it's not one thing it's another, you will often find their servers listed on open relay blackhole lists. <a href="000827.html">DNS problems</a> are another headache.</p>
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SLT Mail.

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            <p>One of the most annoying things about Fedora is the fact that it will not install any packages from the DVD! Sounds absurd? of course it is. If you decide to add any package after the OS installation has completed YUM will look for it online rather than on the DVD. Seems such a waste of bandwidth and time.</p>
            <p>Fortunately, I ran into a <a href="http://www.city-fan.org/tips/YumRepoFromImages">page</a> that explains how the DVD can be set up as a repository. Even then pirut bails out very often bails out saying it doesn't know how to handle a url of the type <em>media:/</em>, it shouldn't because they (should) have all been changed to the proper file:/ format by the createrepo command.</p>
            <p>Then I discovered yumex. yumes also complains at times about the media url but it's a lot easier to use than pirut or plain old yum. Or how I yearn for GnoRPM</p>
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Fedora and Local Repositories.

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            <p>I should have installed <a href="http://fedora.redhat.com">Fedora Core</a> 6 long ago. I was eagerly looking forward to it's release but when that event did happen, I had a <a href="1081.html">burnt motherboard</a> on my hand. I wasn't sure which arch to download cause I wasn't sure whether I would go for an AMD or a <a href="1082.html">core duo</a>. In the end I didn't buy either. That's a long story which I will save for another day, but this is my comments after using Fedora Core for a few hours.</p>
            <p>The most important thing I noticed about FC 6 is that KDE is no longer usable. Those wierd window effects (fading etc) seem to lead to constant lock up. It doesn't seem possible to switch the darned thing off, The control center which used to be a prominent member of the menu seems to have disappeared! I have temporarily switched to gnome.</p>
            <p>The second gripe is that not all the new additions in Fedora Core 6 have been installed because I chose update instead of a clean installation. A clean installation is most annoying, an update is bad enough. But with an update you are stuck if you want to add any new packages. Pirut that atrocious package manager insists on retrieving everything from the net instead of using the DVD. That's a waste of bandwidth and time. It takes an eternity to resolve dependencies.</p>
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Fedora Core 6.

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            <p>We have released version 3.02 of <a href="http://radinks.com/upload/dnd.php">Rad Upload</a> just after version 3.10. Why have we done that? well Firefox 2 seems to have a spot of bother with the way Rad Upload interacts with HTML forms. So we have had to make a slight change for compatibility (of course it still works with the older versions of Firefox).</p>
            <p>Strange as it may seem, for nearly three years, it wasn't possible to directly embed the applet into a form. Though we received a couple of requests each month for this feature, it certainly wasn't a matter of concern for the large number of people who downloaded the applet. But now that it's possible to <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/plus/form.php">integrate the applet into a form</a>, we are getting lots of complaints about it. A large number of these complaints are because of misconfiguration and we provide quick answers to fix them, but with Firefox 2, there certainly was an issue that needed to be fixed. And we have.</p>
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Rad Upload 3.02

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            <p><a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/plus.php">Rad Upload 3.10 (beta)</a> was released yesterday. The difference between this version and the previous one is that two new progress monitors have been included. That means four progress monitors are available to choose from.</p>
            <p>The new version allows you to place the progress monitor inside the applet box instead of appearing as a popup. The older progress monitors can also be embedded in this manner but we felt that a monitor that took up less screen space would be more appropriate. As a result, one of the newly added progress bars has been made as small as possible while conveying usefull feedback to the user.</p>
            <p>We are now about to start work on version 4. Version four will support resunable HTTP upload.</p>

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Rad Upload 3.10

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            <p>It was bound to happen sooner or later. The developers of the <a href="http://www.php.net">PHP engine</a> were going to heed the numerous requests made for file upload hooks so that it become possible to track PHP file upload progress without third party tools like my own MegaUpload.</p>
            <p><a href="http://raditha/php/progress.php">MegaUpload</a> of course is the original PHP file upload progress monitor. It uses a little help from perl because older versions of PHP did not expose any method that a PHP developer could use to find out how much data has been transferred. There have been many other upload progress monitors since Mega Upload. Some of them use AJAX.</p>
            <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/">Rad Upload</a>. Rad Upload was at first a Drag and Drop file uploader with a progress monitor. At the start it had only a few features. Drag and Drop, Recursive folder upload, client side filtering and of course the progress bar. Over the past three years it has grown. Now you find additional features like javascript events, redirect after upload, client side image resize and gzip compression.</p>
            <p>While Mega Upload might eventually become obsolete because of changes in PHP 5.2 there is no chance of that happening with Rad Upload because it has so many other features that a simple combination of an HTML form + PHP enhancements cannot offer. But we will need to keep adding new features to make sure that we are always ahead.</p>
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Monthly Archives for 2006 11