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            It's been a while since Aptana 2.0 came out. I ignored it till version 2.02 was out. As usually happens with most software, what worked in previous versions doesn't work in the new version. Now if this had been with version 2.0, you could have just said someone forgot to do a regression test but not so with 2.02

            So what doesn't work? The Adobe AIR debugger. It gets stuck at 'Launching New_Configuration' and this dialog pops up without the air app starting up.
            <p align="center"><img src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/aptana-debug.png" alt="Aptana error dialog"></p>

            Sounds like a socket error but this is running on localhost and all my ports are open to the local machine. As usual when I run into a problem there is nothing on google and there is nothing on the log file. At this stage I would gladly switch to Netbeans. I use for almost everything other than air. Unfortunatley I never figured out how to use the netbeans debugger with AIR. Couldn't find any howto either.

            Next I came across a reference to a third party debugger that you can use with any AIR app, regardless of the IDE that you use. It looks like a great project. Unfortunately the developers forget to create some documentation. There isn't even a getting started guide.

            I am on holiday so I am doing this on my Mac the only options available are to go back to version 1.5 or to wait till I get back home next week.

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Netbeans, Aptana and Debugging AIR Apps

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            <p>My machine got really slowed down all of a sudden I suspected Netbeans and did a `ps -ef | grep java` to find it's pid and kill it. The output from ps floored me:</p>
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Gnash WTF?

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            In recent weeks, it seems like I spent most of my time finding bugs in the <a href="https://apiwiki.twitter.com">twitter API</a> or third party libraries. Maybe I should get a job in their testing team. This latest bug was discovered in the twitter search API. The <em>from_user</em> and the <em>from_user_id</em> fields do not quite match. Here are some examples:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">{"profile_image_url":"http://a1.twimg.com/profile_images/311054570/SecuritySystemPlaza.comLogo_normal.jpg","created_at":"Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:39:51 +0000","from_user":"SecurityPlaza","to_user_id":null,"text":"GE SECURITY - USA TX6010011 ONLY
                    $78.66 AT WWW.SECURITYSYSTEMPLAZA.COM","id":6168853273,"from_user_id":28463195,"geo":null,"iso_language_code":"en","source":"&amp;lt;a href=&amp;quot;http://apiwiki.
                    twitter.com/&amp;quot; rel=&amp;quot;nofollow&amp;quot;&amp;gt;API&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;"}</span>

                Here the from_user field is given as SecurityPlaza and the from_user_id field shows a value of 28463195, if you look at http://twitter.com/users/28463195.xml you will see that the user id of 28463195 corresponds to <a href="https://twitter.com/ballercoolkid">@ballercoolkid</a> on the other hand http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name=SecurityPlaza&nbsp; gives a user id of 56297110 to &lt;a href="http://twitter.com/SecurityPlaza"&gt;@SecurityPlaza&lt;/a&gt;. So which one of these users sent out the tweet? it was @SecurityPlaza

                Here is the second example:
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">{"profile_image_url":"http://a1.twimg.com/profile_images/364463510/logo_normal.jpg","created_at":"Sun, 29 Nov 2009 09:32:56 +0000","from_user":"hindichannels","to_user_id":null,"text":"Sacked opposition party member to spearhead campaign against Genera
                    l Fonseka: Nov 29, Colombo: A member of the main... http://bit.ly/8OBKwS","id":6166287234,"from_user_id":32271894,"geo":null,"iso_language_code":"en","source
                    ":"&amp;lt;a href=&amp;quot;http://twitterfeed.com&amp;quot; rel=&amp;quot;nofollow&amp;quot;&amp;gt;twitterfeed&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;"}</span>

                Here the user hindichannels has been associated with the userId of 32271894 where as that ID really belongs to <a href="https://twitter.com/mrsdraz">@mrsdraz</a> the correct id for <a href="https://twitter.com/hindichannels">@hindichannels</a> is 61683443 interestingly the results are easily reproducable. Two different searches produced the same errornous output ('<a href="https://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=colombo&amp;rpp=100&amp;show_user=true&amp;page=1">fonseka</a>' and '<a href="https://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=colombo&amp;rpp=100&amp;show_user=true&amp;page=1">colombo</a>')

                I tried these searches between 6:00-7:00pm on Nov 29th by the time that you try these web API calls on your own, the search results would have changed dramatically. So <a href="https://www.raditha.com/blog/archives/raditha.com/blog/images/twit-json-samples.tar.gz">here is a cached copy</a> for you. By the way, the search results may have contained other inaccuracies but these are the only ones that I noticed thanks to some safety checks we have in the <a href="http://pitupasa.com/">Pitupasa</a> code base.

                The XML search results does not have this problem due to the simple fact that the user ids are not included in it!


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Twitter Search API inconsistency

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            <p>If you see a <a href="https://twitter.com/">Twitter</a> or Facebook app that asks for your username and password you should run a mile. Admittedly <a href="https://oauth.net/">OAuth</a> is not anymore secure than CHAP authentication but there is a crucial difference; most people use the same username/password (or at least the same password ) on multiple websites, email addresses, memory cards and what have you. By necessity when a web app saves your password for Twitter or Facebook or any other site, it has to be encrypted with a symmetric key, which means the plain text version can be easily obtained.</p>
            <p>Users don't need any special effort for Oauth but developers do. Writing an application that uses OAuth instead of passwords is supposed to take just a wee bit more effort, (but all seasoned programmers know what exactly that means).</p>
            <p>One of the issues we ran into was caused by Twitter returning an 'Incorrect signature' error for List Delete member api calls. The signature was being generated using the <a href="https://github.com/abraham/twitteroauth">TwitterOauthLib</a>. The signature was correct. It worked fine for all other methods excepts for DELETE calls. If you passed in the same parameters to a different Oauth library, you would get the exact same signature so are we seeing a bug in the twitter API?&nbsp; You might also suspect that this is because the underlying HTTP client library didn't support the DELETE HTTP method. In this case it's curl and the DELETE method is supported. Nevertheless I tried using an HTTP POST while sending the _method=DELETE parameter as suggested by the <a href="https://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-DELETE-list-members">Twitter API documentation</a> with out any luck.</p>
            <p>On further investigation I found that all the parameters were being posted for both DELETE and POST requests. <a href="https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html">RFC 2616</a> doesn't specify how you should pass parameters (request body or query string) for DELETE requests. I decided to change the TwitterOauth code to include the parameters as query strings (get the <a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/oauth-patch.txt">patch</a>). Sure enough twitter accepted the request without the incorrect signature error.&nbsp; The modified code now looks like this:</p>
            <p></p>
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Solving a Twitter OAuth and Incorrect Signatures Mystery

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            <p style="text-align: left;">Upgrading Fedora is easy. It's the post upgrade clean up that kills you. As already mentioned, <a href="fedora-12-rant.html">the move from version 11 to 12,</a> left behind 581 packages from F11. These should ideally be removed to avoid unexpected segfaults, system crashes and inconsistent behavior. It shouldn't happen but it does happen, if you don't cleanup now, later you will have a hard time figuring out some programs will not start up or package updates cannot be applied.&nbsp; `package-cleanup --cleandupes` is a good starting point. This command will remove the older version from the system when there are two versions of the same package. Well that's what it's supp<span style="color: #000000;">osed to do, but it choked:</span></p>

            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #ff0000;">service fuse does not support chkconfig
                    error: %preun(fuse-2.7.4-3.fc.x86_64) scriptlet failed, exit status 1</span>
            </p>
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;"></p>
            <p style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #ff0000;"><span style="color: #000000;">Trying to manually remove the fuse package with yum gets you nowhere fast:</span></span></p>

            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #ff0000;">Running Transaction
                    service fuse does not support chkconfig
                    Error in PREUN scriptlet in rpm package fuse
                    fuse-2.7.4-3.fc.x86_64 was supposed to be removed but is not!</span>
            </p>
            <p style="text-align: left;"></p>
            <p style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #ff0000;"><span style="color: #000000;">Using `rpm -e` produces the exact same error as package-cleanup (which is because package-cleanup was merely passing through the error message it received from rpm). Fortunately the --noscripts paramter to rpm can be used to force the uninstall.</span></span></p>
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;">rpm -e --noscripts fuse-2.7.4-3.fc.x86_64 fuse-2.8.1-1.fc.x86_64</p>
            <p style="text-align: left;">After the rpm command was executed in this manner, package-cleanup also would run to completion with out any errors. But it has a funny idea about what completion is; there are still 433&nbsp; .fc rpms lying about. Most of these packages are from third party repos such as RPM fusion. A yum update ought to fix it and indeed the applying 684MB of updates resulted in all but 68 of the fedora 11 rpms disappearing from the system. Some of these are old kernels/kernels headers which can be removed with `package-cleanup --oldkernels` that still leaves around 60 rpms that you might have to manually uninstall and re install. You might also right the following simple command to remove them all en mass:</p>
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;">yum remove `rpm -qa | grep fc`</p>
            <p style="text-align: left;">The only catch is that it might remove some other important packages but putting those back in might be easier than removing 60 rpms one at a time. BTW why are these rpms tagged as FC11 or FC12, with FC standing for Fedora Core when the OS itself is no longer called Fedora Core? That name hasn't been used for ages. Now it's just Fedora</p>
            <p style="text-align: left;"></p>
            <p style="text-align: left;"></p>

            <p style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #ff0000;">
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Fedora 12 Post Install Cleanup.

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            <p>It is said that thanks to Fedora's half yearly release cycle, you always get to use cutting edge technology. Bleeding edge would be more appropriate and it is no surprise that some RPM repositories do have a branch labeled 'bleeding'.</p>
            <p>Every Fedora upgrade introduces more problems than it solves which makes you wonder if this is any different from Windows. The new features are usually not even worthy of a blog post and <a href="the-never-ending-problems-with-fedora-updates..html">an upgrade never goes smoothly</a>. So why bother? Well each time I install a new version, I sweart that I will skip the next upgrade but after six months of using a buggy OS, you get tired of it and want to get those problems fixed the new version will usually do that but introduce a new set of problems.</p>
            <p>The major issue with the current version F11 is that X server keeps crashing for no apparent reason. Ctrl-Alt-backspace (annoyingly disabled in most new xorg versions, you need to enable it by editing the key mappings) will not kill the server. Ctrl-Alt F2 , F3 etc will not get you a console. Yet the machine is not dead. You can very easily SSH into it from another computer. You can even kill x from the shell but X refuses to die. Well it does die but the screen does not change. It remains steadfastly stuck on the last screen that you worked on. Even those annoying Ajax spinners are frozen for once. The only fix is to go all the way down to runlevel one and then do an init 5 from there. But who has the patience of all that stuff? I usually just hit the reboot button.</p>
            <p>So my desktop, which once upon a long ago would run continuously for weeks at a time, now needs to be restarted several times a day. One sad day, X crashed thrice. Surely even m$ can do better than that?</p>
            <p>If that's not bad enough the update makes things worse. X wouldn't start at all. There is absolutely nothing in the Xorg.log file either but it would start up when you type startx from the shell! explain that!!</p>
            <p>I suspect the reason has lots to do with F11 and F12 RPMS getting mixed up. Each Fedora installation leaves an unbelievable number of packages from the previous version lying around. This version has left 581 F11 rpms behind. The worst was when the first 64bit version came out. There were so many 32bit RPMs left behind that almost nothing would&nbsp; run, even the boot process got stuck.</p>
            <p>In the past I got <a href="1423.html">so fed up with fedora</a> that I even tried Ubuntu and Debian only to find that they are <a href="1458.html">even more annoying</a>.</p>
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Fedora 12 (Rant)

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            <p>The other day, an idiot from SLT, tried to convince me that their 512kb/s ADSL line is as fast as a 2048kb/s WiMax link. You can expect people at SLT to make statements like that. Many of them probably hadn't seen a computer till they joined the company. There is a huge shortage of geeks at Telecom companies in Sri Lanka.</p>
            <p>In actual fact, a 512kbps SLT ADSL line only gives about 430kb/s</p>
            <p><img alt="SLT speed" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/598385338.png"></p>
            <p>Notice that this test is being carried out against, SLT's own speedtest server in Colombo. It's only about 10 Kilometers away but it still takes 32 milliseconds for a ping. Remember Electronic signals travel at 300,000km/s so this indicates slow routers.</p>
            <p>How does SLT perform when you test against a distance server? Much worse.</p>
            <p><img alt="SLT speed" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/598384647.png"></p>
            <p>Right, now let's see how Lanka Bell WiMax Performs:</p>
            <p><img alt="SLT speed" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/598380855.png"></p>
            <p><img alt="SLT speed" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/598382364.png"></p>
            <p>Lankabell's ping isn't so good either but the upload and download speeds are right up there. You get more than 90% of the advertised speed. SLT's subsidiary Mobitel has a mobile broadband service. Here is the speed test:</p>
            <p><img alt="SLT speed" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/601408823.png"><br></p>
            <p><img alt="SLT speed" src="https://www.speedtest.net/result/601409842.png"></p>
            <p>I even stepped outdoors to see if that would improve the speed (since 3.5g signals don't travel well through masonry).</p>
            <p>So in short, if you want an ADSL line that can be compared to a 2mbps WiMax link, you will have to get a 4mbps line.</p>
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Broadband speedtest

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            <p>Comparing the offering of different cloud computing service providers is pretty much like comparing Apples and Oranges. However on the websites of many cloud hosting providers you do find a feature comparison table (usually against amazon EC2). Not surprisingly EC2 always comes off second best. In spite of that EC2 is still in business which means there is something worth investigating. But first a full disclosure: <a href="http://www.radinks.com/">our company</a> is already using Amazon EC2 and we are happy with it. Our DeadlineDue.com site is hosted on an EC2 instance and also relies on the Amazon Associates API to fetch book information. Other than that there is no other factor influencing the contents of this post.</p>
            <p>Comparison between different service providers has been made difficult by the fact that some of them charge you for RAM while other don't. Similarly you may or may not be charged for a virtual hard drive. To make matters worse different providers provide different virtual CPUs sometimes the CPU is described rather vaguely:</p>
            <p>"We believe that customers will typically get results similar to a 2ghz processor, but it can vary depending on the applications requirements."</p>
            <p>(<a href="http://www.flexiscale.com/faqs.php">Flexiscale</a>)</p>
            <p>What's that a P4? a Xeon? or perhaps it's a Celeron. It's actually none of those. All the virtual servers have virtual CPUs but it would be nice if the service provider can say something like "EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) – One EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor." (&lt; a href="http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#instance"&gt;Amazon) so you know what you are getting into.</p>
            <p>The first step in comparing these services would be to normalize them so that we are comparing various citrus fruits rather than apples against oranges. But normalizing the CPU isn't so easy. Most people would tell you that a 2.0GHz Xeon is better than a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo but by how much? You will not easily find a definitive answer. One reason is that different processors are better for different things. Your Core 2 Duo might even perform better on your desktop when used for gaming.</p>
            <p>Because of the lack of scientific data, we are forced to split our applications into two different types - CPU intensive apps and non CPU intensive apps. A Spam filter will likely fall into the former category and a web server delivering mostly static content into the latter. For Non CPU intensive apps we will lump all the Xeons and non Xeons together. For CPU intensive apps we will multiply the processor speed by a factor. In the same manner, we will lump together all the RAM regardless of their nominal speeds. Hard drive speeds will also be different but they will suffer the same fate as the RAM and the CPU</p>
            <p>to be continued...</p>
            <p></p>

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Cloud Hosting or an Apples and Oranges Comparision

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            <p>If you believe everything that cloud hosting companies tell you, thanks to them, small businesses, startups or someone trying out an online venture no longer needs to invest a fortune on servers. In actual fact, the credit for that should go to the thousands of small web hosting companies that made it possible for you to rent (rent not buy) servers right in your own town.</p>
            <p>Cloud hosting companies should however be credited for further reducing the barrier to entry. (If the server is not in your basement it doesn't matter whether it's on the other side of town or the other side of the world).&nbsp; Cloud hosting makes it possible to start with the lowest price option and automatically scale upwards should your service or website become successful or has a sudden spike in traffic.</p>
            <p>Cloud hosting isn't as abundant as virtual or dedicated hosting right now. <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/">Amazon EC2</a>, <a href="http://www.opsourcecloud.net/">Opsource</a>, <a href="https://rackspacecloud.com/">Rackcloud</a> and <a href="http://www.gogrid.com/">GoGrid</a> are some of the names that come to (my) mind.&nbsp; Because each company has different price models, offers different virtual CPUs , virtual storage options and non virtual SLAs it's very hard to do a comparison between them to find out which option is the best for you.</p>
            <p>There are some cases where virtual hosting or even dedicated hosting might be more cost effective than cloud hosting. Additionally there are situations where combining virtual hosting with cloud storage (eg amazon s3) might be the best option.</p>
            <p>Over the next few days, I plan to dig deep into the services provided by these companies and try to figure out which option is most cost effective 'bit for bit'</p>
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            Once upon a long ago, pre match preparation meant spending&nbsp; a great deal of time pouring over their ECO or a BCO or an MCO (perhaps even all three) and a bunch of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_Informant">Šahovski Informator</a> plus half a dozen monograms to end up being thoroughly confused. The next day, after the game is over, they inevitably need to take all those books out again to find out where they went wrong. Fortunately or unfortunately, during my playing days, the number of copies of opening encyclopedia available in Sri Lanka could be counted in your fingers. Now things have become a lot easier thanks to games databases. If your opponent is highly rated, you can analyze all his games and prepare and ambush.

            There are several commercial and free desktop games databases but there are quite a few online databases too. <a href="https://www.chess.com/explorer/">Chess.com Game Explorer</a> is one such database. During a game you can quickly hit the explore button and track the master games or your own games. It is even possible to browse your opponents or any other players completed games as well. The term 'master games' should be treated with a pinch of salt, there are about 2.5 million games in this database but not all of them have been played by FMs, IMs or GMs. According to the rules at chess.com, it's not illegal to resort to an electronic database during correspondence chess but you cannot use an engine. However you are not allowed to resort to a database for blitz or rapid chess (which they call live chess). It should also be added that only premium members can use the games explorer.

            Another online chess database is at <a href="http://www.chessgames.com/">chessgames.com</a> but only 530,000 games are available, however unlike at chess.com, master games really have been played by masters. The UI isn't all that great but it still beats going through books and having to setup the board over and over again. There are many other similar sites but the number of games are far too few.

            When it comes to desktop databases windows users sadly have more of a choice than those using linux. Every commercial chess engine seems to be a bundled with at least a small collection of games. For many years, linux users have been limited to Scid. Perhaps being limited to isn't the right choice of words because Scid is actually a very good program.

            I stopped taking part in competitive chess in 2000 and didn't play at all until 2008 when I started to play online. By that time <a href="http://scid.sourceforge.net/index.html">Scid</a> had almost become abandonware. I guess the authors thought it was feature complete and didn't bother to update it anymore. Instead a fork named <a href="http://chessdb.sourceforge.net/">chessDB</a> (which in turn had not been updated since 2006) had become available. It ships with a database of over 4 million games. So chessDB is what I used to keep track of openings and to manage the games I have played at chess.com for a while now. I knew that it was more than just a database - it's a xboard/UCI client as well. What's more several engines are bundled with it too. However I never managed to get it to analyze a game properly with any of those engines.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/chess/chessdb-err.png" alt="chessdb error message when starting an engine"></p>

            For the life of me, I could never figure out why the xboard interface should complain about a difference of 32 and 64 bit systems. This is a client/server system after all it matters not whether one has a 64 bit OS while the other has a 32 bit OS. The other mystery is about why the error message mentions windows (isn't windows an 8 bit system?). So just out of curiosity, I decided to take a look at Scid. Lo and Behold, there has been an update just last month! This new version (4) has a new structure for the database but you can convert scid 3 databases to version 4. Scid 3 (.si3) is the format used by chessDB and those files including the 4million games database was easily imported.

            Scid 4 easily interacts with engines and what's more, it comes bundled with three of them (Toga II, Scidlet and Phalanx ). It takes a little while to figure out how game can be completely analyzed by the engine without having it produce a list of variations as long as your arm for even the most trivial alternatives. But it looks good. Real good.

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            It is widely believed that the <a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/chess/">gnuchess</a> and <a href="http://www.tim-mann.org/xboard.html">xboard</a> is all that you need to play a game of chess on a linux computer. While it's certainly enough to get you started, it's certainly not the last word. Besides, <a href="chess-engines-and-databases.html">playing against the computer is just a waste of time</a>, computers should be used only for post mortem analysis.&nbsp; The Xboard user interface is rather archaic and it wouldn't even start up on one of my linux boxes (xboard: no fonts match pattern -*-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*).
            <p style="text-align: center;"><a title="xboard screenshot" href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/chess/xboard.png"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/chess/xboard-t.png" alt="xboard screenshot"></a></p>

            With most non-commercial chess engines you need a separate client software to provide a GUI for the engine (sometimes you do find them bundled together you can even find packages that include all three; opening database, client and engine). Such clients are often based on the Xboard protocol (sometimes called the winboard protocol). Xboard of course is the grand daddy of all xboard (and winboard) clients. There are many xboard implementations for windows but only a few for Linux and OS X. Fortunately many of the software written for windows can be installed under wine. But first lets look at the native apps. The next one I tried though wasn't really native, it was a Java app named <a href="https://code.google.com/p/decaf-chess-interface/">Decaf</a>. It turns out that Decaf is a front end for the &lt;a href="http://www.freechess.org/"&gt;free internet chess server&lt;/a&gt; and cannot be used with an engine.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><a title="eboard screenshot" href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/chess/eboard.png"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/chess/eboard-t.png" alt="eboard screenshot"></a></p>

            The next one I looked at was Eboard. This again is better suited as a frontend for the FICS. According to the online documentation eboard can be used to analyze a game but the documentation doesn't tell you how exactly that can be done. As with xboard, the UI is a bit archaic so I decided to look beyond.&nbsp; I looked past <a href="http://knights.sourceforge.net/news_archive.php">Knights</a> , <a href="http://primates.ximian.com/~jpr/gnome-chess/">Gnome Chess</a> (not updated in ages) and <a href="http://www.jinchess.com/">Jin</a> (FICS client) before taking a closer look at <a href="http://slibo.sourceforge.net/">Slibo</a>. It hasn't been updated since 2003 either but the screenshots looked impressive. Unfortunately I never got to install it. There are no binaries available and the source wouldn't compiled (it's looking for Qt 3 headers/libraries - the current version is Qt is 4.5.2 ).
            <p style="text-align: center;"><a title="pychess screenshot" href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/chess/pychess.png"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/chess/pychess-t.png" alt="pychess screenshot"></a></p>

            Next option was <a href="http://pychess.googlepages.com/screenshots">pychess</a> - it could be easily installed with yum and it's user interface looks decent.&nbsp; That seems to pretty much exhaust the list of chess clients available for linux. I guess it's time to look at windows apps that can be installed under wine or to look for a combined engine/client.

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Chess On Linux

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            <p>Only an utter moron would choose to play chess against the computer. It's dead boring and if you had not already acquired a taste for it through over the board play, you might even erroneously conclude that it is the game that is boring. There is second reason too; it's well nigh impossible to beat a modern computer at chess. A super GM might be able to beat another one in OTB play but that same player would struggle to beat a chess engine that plays at 2500 strength. That's because half the game is across outside the board. It's gamesmanship and psychological tactics. You can stifle a yawn or snigger at the computer to make it feel that it made a blunder.</p>
            <p>Chess software has it's uses to too. Gone are the days when players swore by print copies of the ECO or the BCO (here in Sri Lanka, we never had them anyway). They have been replaced by openings databases. You no longer need to subscribe to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_Informant">Šahovski Informator</a> to keep your openings knowledge upto date. Nowadays you can download a pgn file from the <a href="http://www.chesscenter.com/twic/twic.html">The Week in Chess</a></p>
            <p>The other useful purpose served by chess software is in Post Mortem analysis. You no longer have to go begging to a strong player to have a complicated game analyzed. Even then the analysis may not be perfect (unless your friend is a GM). On the other hand, a chess engine given sufficient time to ponder rarely makes any mistakes. So a Chess Engine plus an Openings database (sometimes you need a client software too) are essential tools for anyone who takes chess seriously. Well, I take chess very seriously but I haven't had an engine installed on my computer for nine years! That's because I retired from the game in 2000 however I started playing online at yahoo chess the day <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Fischer">Bobby Fischer</a> died (what a sad day that was). Many players on yahoo chess are said to use chess engines for cheating. So I switched to <a href="https://www.chess.com/">chess.com</a> early this year and started playing seriously again about the middle of the year.</p>
            <p>I have slowly begun to find my touch and my ratings are going up slowly in fits and starts. I have been using chess.com 's post mortem analysis engine to analyze my games but i've become fed up with it of late because the analysis is woefully inaccurate. I suspect the reason for this is because it analyzes hundreds if not thousands of games each day and thus allocates limited CPU for each game. The analysis is so bad, I have even see it miss mates, not once but twice. So the time has come to finally install an engine. While there are hundreds of engines for Windows, there are precious few for linux. I am planning to go through them and find something suitable tomorrow. So tune in again</p>
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Chess Engines and Databases

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            <p>Having successfully persuaded one of my friends to buy an <em>Ezy SlimTop</em>, which is an Intel Atom based computer that runs with Linux, I recommended it to another friend. When she tried to buy one they were out of stock. This was less than a week after the product was launched so we can safely assume that it has been selling like hot cakes. A couple of days later my friend did get hold of one.</p>
            <p>After successfully copying her old files the first thing she tried was to start Thunderbird to check mail. Where the heck is Thunderbird on this thing? Well it's not there. Ezy Slim Top ships with a customized version of Ubuntu. I have never been a fan of Ubuntu but surely the Thunderbird package is included in the Ubuntu DVD? why couldn't those Moron's install it? I told my friend all she needed to do was to download the tarball, expand it, look for a file called thunderbird or mozilla-thunderbird or something similar and just click on it, it will run. No dice. She says nothing happens! She was adamant that she did everything right. I was getting rather irritated with her but finally asked her to send it over for me to have a look. What happens when I click on the thunderbird binary? nothing!</p>
            <p>Thunderbired fails silently but when your run it from the command line a set of errors about missing stdc++ libraries show up. The obvious thing to do is to install Thunderbird with apt-get. That will result in all the dependencies being installed. But for that you need the root password. Or do you? Well on Ubuntu you can do without the root password. They encourage using sudo instead of a root login. Sudo will prompt you for a password but what you need to enter is <em>your own password</em>. Right so what is the default user's password? no one knows! </p>
            <p>This Slim Top is configured to login automatically with the default user account (named ezy) and that default user's password is not included anywhere you cannot look it up from the website cause they don't have a website. The day the product was launched, their site just said 'coming soon...' and that's all you can still find on the it more than a month later.</p>
            <p>Any password can be reset by booting up in single user mode. When I tried it, I was sent a weird recovery console with an even weirder keyboard mapping. So rebooted giving bash as the init script (of course you can use any other shell too (append init=/bin/bash in the grub bootup line)). I reset the password for both the accounts and rebooted. Yet, no matter how I try, it refuses to accept the passwords that I just chose!</p>
            <p>I rebooted again and reset the passwords again, still sudo and su both refuse my password. I tried for a third time, This time, I checked the /etc/shadow file before and after the reset to make sure that the changes have taken place. They haven't, the hash is exactly the same. It was then that it occurred to me that the file system might be mounted in read only mode. It is. So I remounted in R/W mode and reset the passwords one more time. This time it worked but why didn't the <em>passwd</em> program produce an error when the file system was mounted in read only mode? All this hassle could have been avoided if they had included the password in the booklet (well handbill more likely) that comes with the computer.</p>
            <p>The next day, I returned the computer to the owner but only to receive another complaint; the printer doesn't work. Shouldn't they be complaining to the vendor? well the vendor doesn't have a clue. Wearily I asked her to send it back (by this time, I had forgotten the password so had to go through the reset process one more time). The printer is an HP 1020, it has a driver for linux (name <a href="http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/">foo2zjs</a>). On their site, they say in bold letters: "DON'T USE the foo2zjs package from: Ubuntu, SUSE, Mandrake/Manrivia, Debian, RedHat, ...". Now if easy Slim Top ships with a customized version of Ubuntu, why can't they replace the bad driver from the install DVD and replace it with the direct download from the site?</p>
            <p>These are two issues that any ordinary user will not be able to solve on their own. Others encountering these sort of problems probably format the machine and install XP or Vista on it. Vista would crawl and XP wouldn't be much better and it would most likely be a pirate copy of windows as well. So by this half baked approach to linux, Browns is harming both linux and themselves.</p>
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How not to sell computers running linux (part 2).

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            <p>About a month ago, a friend of mine, a first time computer buyer bought a budget computer with an Intel Atom chip and Linux on my recommendation. I haven't heard from him since, either he doesn't have any complaints and is deliriously happy or he is not talking to me anymore.</p>
            <p>Recently, one of Sri Lanka's best established companies (Browns PLC) started selling Intel Atom based PCs powered by Linux. The very first day they started operations, a friend of mine from one of the most remote and backward parts of Sri Lanka (yes I do have such friends) bought one of those machines (the Ezy Slim Top). The other alternatives were to buy a branded box with a dual core chip or to get one from Unity Plaza. Most of the vendors in Unity Plaza are not to be trusted (sure there are a few good ones but it's darned hard to tell the difference). To make matters to make a warranty claim you need to bring your computer to Colombo (not very easy when you are living in the middle of no where and don't have your own car) and argue with them till the cows come home. What convinced him was seeing a girl who was about 12 years old, lugging her computer into one of the shops to get it repaired.</p>
            <p>The other option is just pay a lot of extra money for a powerful CPU which you will never utilize to the full (just check now how much of your processor you are using, bet it's less than 10%). The second problem is that most of the branded machines ship with Vista or XP, I simply cannot understand why people pay so much money for garbage. Since money was at a premium it wasn't hard to convince him on this point either.</p>
            <p>Having read so far, you might wonder what all this has to do with the topic of the post ; 'how not to sell computers running linux', well the trouble started the second time I recommended this same computer to a friend. This time it's someone who's been using one for years to do word processing. I can see you roll your eyes in your head but I got such friends too. But this is enough today, check back tomorrow for the next episode</p>
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How not to sell computers running linux.

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            Tried to load a page with an applet in FF for the first time since upgrading from Tiger to Snow Leopard and this dialog pops up.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/applet-cache.png" alt="converting cached applets"></p>

            I don't quite see the need to convert the applets in the applet cache in this manner. What the heck is the conversion anyway? any applet compiled with java.4+ will run on Java 6 (though the reverse is not true).

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Apple Tries To Turn People Off Java?

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            <p>The other day, I upgraded from to OS X Snow Leopard and I wasn't entirely pleased with Apple. However having used it for a while I have become less resentful. One of the reasons is that Snow Leopard is fast much much faster than Tiger. This is probably due to the new version being a real 64 bit operating system. The second reason is that I now have a fresh install (I couldn't upgrade because the installer didn't like my partition table) so there isn't any blubber lying around. Last but not least I now have a hard drive that is three times as big as the drive that originally shipped on this mac. <a href="../../linux/drive-speed.php">Larger hard drives generally tend to be faster</a> than smaller ones.</p>
            <p>Once I rsynced the bakups into the home folders, most of the newly re-installed applications continued from where they left off as if nothing had happened (well, they are running a little bit faster). Right so the Snow Leopard is speedy but what else? hmmm, well there's 'stacks' but even though this is trumpeted as a great feature this doesn't look at all like a novelty for a linux user. It is widely believed Windows is heavily influenced by OS X but what many people don't know is that OS X is heavily influenced by X Window. There is something similar to the stacks feature in linux desktops that places all open windows of a given application together in the task bar as a stack. As for spaces, it's been available on X Window systems for at least 15 years!</p>
            <p>Other new features includes Safari 4 (if you could call it a new feature, much of what is new in Snow Leopard is actually refinements of what shipped with Leopard.) but who uses Safari? And then there is support for Microsoft Exchange so what? who cares about exchange? A worse piece of software has never been written.</p>
            <p>Other than the speed the only thing I have found useful is a new feature they are not even shouting about: More reliable disk eject! In tiger, when I pressed the eject button to remove a CD or DVD from the drive, the eject mechanism would continue to try to eject the disk long after it has been ejected. That's right, every few seconds you will hear the familiar sound the drive makes when it ejects a disk but there is no disk in the drive!</p>
            <p>I was in fact contemplating getting a replacement drive. There are no OEM drives in Colombo that would fit, so I would have had to ask a friend or relative abroad to buy it or get it from the local agents and pay through the nose (and wait three weeks for delivery). Upgrading to Snow Leopard seems to have sorted out this disk eject problem so the money hasn't been wasted after all.</p>
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Thawing out the Snow Leopard

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            Apple's much hyped OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard is here. I didn't bother to update from Tiger to Leopard and there was a pre release discount available, so I thought of grabbing it and started off on a long and tedious process that left me feeling like a fool. Apple's online store in the US ships only to addresses with in the US. Similarly the store in the UK ships only to UK addresses and the one in Singapore only ships within Singapore.

            Sri Lanka supposedly has three authorized agents for Apple products but I seriously doubt if Apple Inc is even aware of their existence. Come to think of it, Steve Jobs and other blokes at Apple might be vaguely aware of a place call Mexico and another called Canada but they are blissfully unaware of the world outside (still trying to figure out how macs ended up being manufactured in China). So it's no surprise that we don't have an official apple store for Sri Lanka. I ordered from the US one giving the address of a friend in New York. That was on the 26th of August. My friend re posted it when he got his hands on it and it arrived in Colombo yesterday. Today I tried to upgrade my system and now I am beginning to regret it.

            After backing up, changing the boot device and going through the first few steps of the installer, I was presented with this very annoying message:
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/mac-install.jpg" alt="Install Error"></p>

            That's right, the installer doesn't like the partition system. Less than a month ago, <a href="macbook-hard-drive-toasted.html">the drive on my macbook pulled a hamstring </a> when I replaced it, I created three partitions, intending to restore the existing tiger installation on one of them, I planned to put Fedora on the second (but didn't because the Fedora DVD wouldn't boot on the macbook (more on that later)) and third was kept aside to install Leopard or Snow Leopard. Apparently the partition table type cannot now be changed without losing all the data on the drive. Very annoying but I decided to go ahead with it cause I have bakups.

            The bakup was created with rsync (yeah I am a linux man), in hindsight, it would have been much better to use <a href="http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html">superduper</a> instead cause at the 'migrate your old stuff' stage, the installer didn't detect the contents of the external drive on which the bakups were placed. I said never mind and skipped it. It was only after booting up that I realized what a fool I've been. iPhoto, one of the most usefull products on OS X is missing. Yeah right iPhoto, which is part of iLife is bundled with all new Macs but if you lose your copy you need to cough up another USD 79 for it.

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A Shivering Snow Leopard

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            <p><a href="https://jquery.com">Jquery</a> and it's plugins are so popular because they allow you to do in a couple of lines of code what might otherwise take days and days of effort.. The <a href="http://tablesorter.com/docs/">tablesorter</a> plugin is one that allows you to sort an HTML table by clicking on any of the column names in the table header. I am talking of a real HTML table not one that is made with UL and LI. Tabular data should be represented by TABLE, TR and TD tags but some people go overboard with LIs and use them even for tabular data.</p>
            <p>The table sorter plugin can sort both static and dynamic data inserted into the HTML through user interaction. It can also cope with data retrieved from remote sources (with an XHR). Here is an example straight out of the docs:</p>
            <p></p>
            <pre>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$(<span>document</span>).ready(<span>function</span>()&nbsp;{<p></p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$(<span>"table"</span>).tablesorter();</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$(<span>"#ajax-append"</span>).click(<span>function</span>()&nbsp;{</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$.get(<span>"assets/ajax-content.html"</span>,&nbsp;<span>function</span>(html)&nbsp;{</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span>//&nbsp;append&nbsp;the&nbsp;"ajax'd"&nbsp;data&nbsp;to&nbsp;the&nbsp;table&nbsp;body</span></p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$(<span>"table&nbsp;tbody"</span>).append(html);</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span>//&nbsp;let&nbsp;the&nbsp;plugin&nbsp;know&nbsp;that&nbsp;we&nbsp;made&nbsp;a&nbsp;update</span></p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$(<span>"table"</span>).trigger(<span>"update"</span>);</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span>//&nbsp;set&nbsp;sorting&nbsp;column&nbsp;and&nbsp;direction,&nbsp;this&nbsp;will&nbsp;sort&nbsp;on&nbsp;the&nbsp;first&nbsp;and&nbsp;third&nbsp;column</span></p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span>var</span>&nbsp;sorting&nbsp;=&nbsp;[[<span>2</span>,<span>1</span>],[<span>0</span>,<span>0</span>]];</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span>//&nbsp;sort&nbsp;on&nbsp;the&nbsp;first&nbsp;column</span></p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$(<span>"table"</span>).trigger(<span>"sorton"</span>,[sorting]);</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;});</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span>return</span>&nbsp;<span>false</span>;</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;});</p><p>});</p></pre>
            <p></p>
            <p>What if your webservice only produced XML and you had to rely on an XSL Tranformation to convert it to HTML? Well I found out the hard way that this otherwise excellent plugin has trouble with that. The data would be inserted into the table but the rows would not be sorted. Only the original content (the data that was statically included would be included). So I ran into a funny situation where only the top half of a table would have it's row order changed while the bottom half remained obstinately fixed! Here is the fragment of code that fetched the data, transformed it and appended it into the TBODY.</p>
            <p></p>
            <pre><p></p><p>    $.get('report.xsl', function(tr){</p><p>        xsl_pages = tr;</p><p>        xProcPrimary.importStylesheet(tr);</p><p>        $.get('report.php', function(data){</p><p>            xmlMain = data;</p><p>            var fragment = xProcPrimary.transformToFragment(xmlMain, document);</p><p>            $("#msummary tbody").append(fragment);</p><p>            $("#msummary").trigger("update");</p><p>        });</p><p>    } );</p><p></p></pre>
            <p></p>
            <p>After a couple of hours of head scratching and the tedium; I figured out that the </p>
            <li>DocumentFragment</li> is being appended to the table in some weird way, fixing bugs in your own code is hard enough so I never entertained any thoughts of finding the cause of the problem in the tablesorter codebase. Instead, I came up with a work around: Add the DocumentFragment to a hidden HTML element, then call the jQuery.html() method on that element to generate the HTML source for it and append that HTML into the table. In other words, I cam up with a quick and painless way to convert a DocumentFragment into HTML source.<p></p>
            <p></p>
            <pre><p></p><p>    $.get('report.xsl', function(tr){</p><p>        xsl_pages = tr;</p><p>        xProcPrimary.importStylesheet(tr);</p><p>        $.get('report.php', function(data){</p><p>            xmlMain = data;</p><p>            var fragment = xProcPrimary.transformToFragment(xmlMain, document);</p><p>            $("div.sortable").html(fragment);</p><p>            alert(fragment);</p><p>            $("#msummary tbody").append($("div.sortable").html());</p><p>            $("div.sortable").html();</p><p>            $("#msummary").trigger("update");</p><p>        });</p><p>    } );</p><p></p></pre>
            <p></p>

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            Every once in a while I get fed up with Firefox and switch to <a href="http://www.konqueror.org/">Konqueror</a>, only to return a few days later. The latest annoyance with ff is an old one; when you type in a text into the search box, an error pops up.
            <p style="padding-left: 60px;"><span style="color: #800000;">ASSERT: *** Search: _installLocation: engine has no file!
                    Stack Trace:
                    0:ENSURE_WARN(false,_installLocation: engine has no file!,2147500037)
                    1:()
                    2:()
                    3:SRCH_ENG_getSubmission(wad,application/x-suggestions+json)
                    4:getSubmission(wad,application/x-suggestions+json)
                    5:(wad,searchbar-history,null,[xpconnect wrapped nsIAutoCompleteObserver])</span>

                Fortunately it's not very serious and can be made to go away by just restarting FF. On this occasion, I was too lazy to do even that and continued with my work until some JavaScript started to misbehave. Then I tried to view source, only to run into this error:
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #800000;">XML Parsing Error: undefined entity
                    Location: chrome://global/content/viewSource.xul
                    Line Number6, Column 1:&lt;window id="viewSource"</span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            This time though, I am not going to switch back to Konqueror, cause I know that the culprit here isn't Firefox but yum!. That's right, you see this sort of error most often when the system has been updated. When firefox is updated it has to be restarted but when you do the update with yum it doesn't happen automatically.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

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Wierd Firefox Errors

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            On August 8th I left for a well deserved ten day vacation (working vacation mind you) so it was only natural that my Macbook hard drive died shortly before that. I am thankful that the drive didn't roll kick the bucket on the first day of the vacation. That would have forced an immediate return to Colombo and force me to lug my desktop (monitor and all) back with me!

            It all started when the Macbook suddenly froze up while I was browsing and wouldn't respond at all and had to be shutdown with a long press of the power button. When I tried to start it up again, a screen with a flashing folder + question mark icon popped. Immediately I knew this had to be a toasted hard drive. This was confirmed in 2 seconds by Google.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><a title="A question mark" href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/apple-question.jpg"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/apple-question-t.jpg" alt="A question mark with a folder icon"></a></p>

            I was pretty sure my backups were up to date but having once tossed out a dead hard drive thinking the backups were upto when they were not, I was really determined to take a close look at the drive's contents before tossing it. That meant buying a firewire cable to attempt to connect the macbook to another in target mode. I knew the chances of it working were remote so I bought a hard drive enclosure as well. The idea was to freeze it and put it in the enclosure. Obviously you cannot put in a frozen drive back in the macbook because it would cause condensation and cause more damage. If it condensates in the enclosure you will probably be able to dry it out with a blower and still manage to reuse the enclosure later on.

            You might our read that freezing a drive to recover data is a myth&nbsp; or an urban legend. I can assure you that it works, when one of the hard drives on our company's server died, the hosting company (<a href="http://www.webquarry.com">The Webquarry</a>) admin put the drive in the freezer and managed to recover quite a bit&nbsp; of the data.

            Much to my chagrin I found that I need not have bothered with any of this. The problem was with the contacts. The SATA connector appeared to have shaken itself lose. I discovered this after taking out the hard drive and putting it back in (with fingers firmly crossed of course) and it just worked!! So it was the new drive that went into the enclosure. Then I used superduper to clone the old drive into a partition on the new drive ( The old drive is only 80GB but the new one has 320GB). Then I swapped the drives and booted up with the new one. Thanks to <a href="http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html">superduper</a> the process was painless.

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Macbook Hard drive toasted

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            <p>If you want to write good , fast, memory efficient code (pick any three) you need to start off with good fast memory efficient algorithms. Using fprintf instead of fwrite or&nbsp; java.util.ArrayList instead of java.util.Vector or $.ajax instead of $.get doesn't really make any difference at all. If you spend your life trying to figure out which is faster or takes up less memory you will never get anything done. Sometimes <a href="readfile-vs-include-echo-vs-print-dont-bother.html">people who ought to know better even shout from the rooftops</a> that you should waste your time trying to shave off a few milliseconds here and there but fortunately there are more wiser heads to shoot them down.</p>
            <p>Since PHP added support for JSON encode and decode a lot has been written about how it's more efficient than serialize / unserialize and the have got the numbers to proove it too. In one study it was pointed out that json_encode takes 0.63 milli seconds to convert a certain object to text while the serialize function took just 0.41 milliseconds however that author suggests that all existing code that uses serialize/unserialize should be changed to json_encode/json_decode because decode/unserialize more often than encode/serialize and json_decode takes just 1.42ms vs 2.28 ms for unserialize. Another mutt had reproduced the same sort of results on eight different servers. Sure that's about a 50% improvement in speed. And if your script just happens to be executed 1,000,000 times you will save a whopping 860 seconds! you will probably get a 100% increment at your next evaluation too.</p>
            <p>Most often you want to convert and object to a string because you want to send it over the wire or save it in a database. If your applications appears to be slow it's probably because the database query is slow or it takes a lot of time to retrieve the data from the remote server. If it takes two seconds to retrieve/store&nbsp; the data what difference does it make to shave of 0.0005 of a second by changing from json to php serialize?</p>
            <p>I am not saying you should not make any effort to optimize your code at all. Wordpress and Windows OS are examples that scream out for optimization. What I am saying is that you should write your code with a decent algorithm (but don't rupture yourself looking for one), then test your app. If you find it's slow and doesn't scale well, run it through a profiler to find the bottleneck. You will usually find that about 20% of the code takes up about 80% of the execution time sometims it's worse. All you need to do is to look at that part of the code and optimize it or perhaps even change the algorithm.</p>
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json_encode/json_decode vs serialize/unserialize and fools vs idiots.

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            At the time of I drafted this (July 16 9:30 pm) I had 557 followers on twitter. Since then many have been culled in a spammer/bot cleanup that has thrown everyone into confusion. This confusing fact though was detected before the cull and the original post (in present tense though it belongs to the past) follows:

            <a href="https://twitter.com/kasunvp">@kasunvp</a> is not one of my 557 followers - or at least that's what the followers list for my account (<a href="https://twitter.com/e4c5">@e4c5</a>) shows.&nbsp; Kasun on the other hand is following me as you can clearly see from this screen shot:
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/kasunvp.jpg" alt=""></p>

            Kasun's userId is 14449390 and mine is 17185376 since Kasun is following me, 14449390 should appear in my list of followers but it doesn't. You can get the followers list in <a href="https://twitter.com/following/ids/kasunvp.xml">XML</a> and confirm this for yourself. Well, at least that was so at the time of writing (9:03PM on July 16 - here is the cached result) but things might have changed. If 14449390 is not in the list of people I follow, 17185376 should not be in the list of people kasunvp is following either but it is ( check the <a href="https://twitter.com/followers/ids/e4c5.xml">xml</a> (or the cached result)).

            The twitter API has a method to verify follower/followings. The REST link for the kasunvp/e4c5 combo is <a href="https://twitter.com/friendships/show.xml?target_screen_name=e4c5&amp;source_screen_name=kasunvp">http://twitter.com/friendships/show.xml?target_screen_name=e4c5&amp;source_screen_name=kasunvp</a> it confirms that e4c5 is being followed.

            At the time of writing I have 557 followers on twitter and <a href="https://twitter.com/kasunvp">@kasunvp</a> is not one of them - or at least that's what the followers list for my account (<a href="https://twitter.com/e4c5">@e4c5</a>) shows.&nbsp; Kasun on the other hand is following me as you can clearly see from this screenshot:

            Kasun's userId is 14449390 and mine is 17185376 since Kasun is following me, 14449390 should appear in my list of followers but it doesn't. You can get the followers list in XML and confirm this for yourself. Well, at least that was so at the time of writing (9:03PM on July 16 - here is the cached result) but things might have changed. If 14449390 is not in the list of people I follow, 17185376 should not be in the list of people kasunvp is following either but it is ( check the <a href="https://twitter.com/followers/ids/e4c5.xml">xml</a> (or the cached result)).

            The twitter API has a method to verify follower/followings. The REST link for the kasunvp/e4c5 combo is <a href="https://twitter.com/friendships/show.xml?target_screen_name=e4c5&amp;source_screen_name=kasunvp">http://twitter.com/friendships/show.xml?target_screen_name=e4c5&amp;source_screen_name=kasunvp</a> it confirms that e4c5 is being followed.
            <pre style="padding-left: 30px;">&lt;relationship&gt;
 &lt;target&gt;
 &lt;followed_by type="boolean"&gt;true&lt;/followed_by&gt;
 &lt;screen_name&gt;e4c5&lt;/screen_name&gt;
 &lt;following type="boolean"&gt;false&lt;/following&gt;
 &lt;id type="integer"&gt;17185376&lt;/id&gt;
 &lt;/target&gt;
 &lt;source&gt;
 &lt;followed_by type="boolean"&gt;false&lt;/followed_by&gt;
 &lt;notifications_enabled nil="true"/&gt;
 &lt;screen_name&gt;kasunvp&lt;/screen_name&gt;
 &lt;blocking nil="true"/&gt;
 &lt;following type="boolean"&gt;true&lt;/following&gt;
 &lt;id type="integer"&gt;14449390&lt;/id&gt;
 &lt;/source&gt;
&lt;/relationship&gt;</pre>
            Pretty much the same anomaly was encountered between @e4c5 and @chesstips (chess.com)

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Follower/Following Oddity.

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            A struggled for a while to get <a href="fedora-11-and-tweetdeck..html">Adobe Air installed on my fedora 11</a> box, so that I may run <a href="https://tweetdeck.com/beta/">TweetDeck</a>. Finally I did get it running and was happily using TweetDeck for a short while. Well it was only minutes. Then they released a TweetDeck update. After the update was installed TweetDeck wouldn't start up again. At the time I was busy with other things so I forgot about it for a while. In the meantime, I installed <a href="http://www.aptana.com/">Aptana</a> along with the Adobe Air plugin.

            I am switching to Adobe Air because JavaFX as a failed technology. Air impressed at first look. It felt as though I could take to Air like a duck taking to water - that's the way it should have been with <a href="the-f-in-javafx.html">JavaF(ailed)X</a> but it wasn't. After playing with Air/Aptana for a while, I put it on the back burner and returned to it today. Now my first weak attempt at creating an air application seems to have fallen into a black hole. Soon as you hit the run button, Aptana blinks but nothing happens. The application doesn't run and there is nothing in the console. Other than the rather unhelpfull message that the application has terminated. After hitting the run button another half a dozen times, I decided to run it manually using ADL. Lo and Behold there is a more informative message:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Application crashed with an unhandled SIGSEGV
                    Crashlog has been dumped in /tmp/airCrashLogs/0720_1545_U87bom</span>

                It was then that I looked into the /tmp/airCrashlogs folder and found it full of them. While the log is human readable, there wasn't anything in it that this human could understand. At the top there is a list of libraries that have been loaded as long as your arm:
            </p>
            <div style="overflow: scroll; padding-left: 30px; width: 425px; height: 150px; margin-bottom: 20px; color: #993300;">
                <pre>00110000-0013e000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 161955&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; /lib/libssl3.so
0013e000-00140000 rw-p 0002d000 08:02 161955&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; /lib/libssl3.so
00140000-00142000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 108463&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libpk-gtk-module.so
00142000-00143000 rw-p 00001000 08:02 108463&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libpk-gtk-module.so
00143000-00220000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 14617&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0.2000.3
00220000-00221000 rw-p 000dd000 08:02 14617&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0.2000.3
00223000-00226000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 5004&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; /lib/libgmodule-2.0.so.0.2000.3
00226000-00227000 rw-p 00002000 08:02 5004&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; /lib/libgmodule-2.0.so.0.2000.3
00229000-0022d000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 161964&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; /lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0.2000.3
0022d000-0022e000 rw-p 00003000 08:02 161964&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; /lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0.2000.3
0022e000-00232000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 103228&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libcanberra-gtk-module.so
00232000-00233000 rw-p 00003000 08:02 103228&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libcanberra-gtk-module.so
00233000-002c2000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 102488&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6.3.20
002c2000-002c6000 rw-p 0008e000 08:02 102488&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6.3.20</pre>
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            Right at the bottom is the business end of the crashlog. There it has this bit of information:
            <div style="overflow: scroll; padding-left: 30px; width: 425px; height: 150px; margin-bottom: 20px; color: #993300;">
                <pre>/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xe7c082]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xe70572]
[0x161410]

/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xca37cb]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xca3811]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xca4a19]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xd8499e]
[0xf48f6714]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xf5b638]
[0xf450bf66]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xfaee1c]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xf5b638]
[0xf45089c8]

/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xfaee1c]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xf5cea1]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xf7546c]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xdc771d]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xdc789e]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xc045fa]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xc1704f]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so(ADLEntryMain+0xd8) [0xc17366]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/adl(__gxx_personality_v0+0x3ab) [0x8048bf3]
/lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe6) [0x8e8a66]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/adl(__gxx_personality_v0+0x49) [0x8048891]</pre>
            </div>
            Again this is nothing that I could make use of. So I tried running the application from the command line using adl only to run into the same error. Next up I tried running it as root and it worked! Now this app is nothing more than a simple hello world. It worked perfectly the last time I ran it but today it will not run. Same goes with TweetDeck, one time it was working fine but now it also causes a core dump. Of course the culprit here is the <a href="https://www.adobe.com/products/air/">Air</a> runtime rather than TweetDeck or Aptana or even my own hello world. Wish they would fix it soon or at least provide a less verbose but more usefull error message so that I can figure it out.

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Adobe Air on Linux

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            Thought of trying out Aptana for two reasons; the first being the fact that it has support for Adobe Air and secondly I wanted try to an alternative to Netbeans cause Netbeans 6.7 is such a memory hog. Netbeans has always been a memory hog but this version really takes the cake. It's is worse than previous versions. The release candidate were absolute nightmares I was worried that my drives would be swapped to death. As for <a href="http://www.aptana.com">Aptana</a>, it cannot be installed with YUM. You have to download the zip and install it manually and such installations usually lead to errors.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">(AptanaStudio:12284): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "nodoka",</span></p>

            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">(AptanaStudio:12284): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "nodoka",
                    (Build 1.5.0.25497) [ERROR] Unable to determine current running state of Aptana Studio
                    org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: No more handles [Unknown Mozilla path (MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME not set)]
                    at org.eclipse.swt.SWT.error(SWT.java:3910)
                    at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.create(Mozilla.java:483)</span>

                This is on Fedora 11 (64 bit). Then I tried a different machine (also Fedora 11 64bit, but one which had every possible package under the sun installed on it). There I get a different error.
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">(Build 1.5.0.25497) [ERROR] Unable to determine current running state of Aptana Studio
                    java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Cannot load 32-bit SWT libraries on 64-bit JVM
                    at org.eclipse.swt.internal.Library.loadLibrary(Library.java82)
                    at org.eclipse.swt.internal.Library.loadLibrary(Library.java59)
                    at org.eclipse.swt.internal.C.&lt;clinit&gt;(C.java:21)
                    ....
                    at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.main(Main.java287)</span>

                The error [Unknown Mozilla path (MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME not set)] can apparently be fixed by installing XULRunner (which I already had) and then setting the MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME enviornement variable to point to your xulrunner installation directory with&nbsp; 'export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib64/xul-runner.9.1/ (<a href="http://forums.aptana.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&amp;t=8196">aptana forums</a>). Once that's done, I get another error:
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">(Build 1.5.0.25497) [ERROR] Unable to determine current running state of Aptana Studio
                    org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: No more handles [MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME='/usr/lib64/xulrunner.9.1/'] (java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no swt-mozilla-gtk-3550 or swt-mozilla-gtk in swt.
                    library.path, java.library.path or the jar file)
                    at org.eclipse.swt.SWT.error(SWT.java:3910)
                    at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.create(Mozilla.java:514)
                    ...
                    at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.run(Main.java1)
                    Caused by: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no swt-mozilla-gtk-3550 or swt-mozilla-gtk in swt.library.path, java.library.path or the jar file
                    at org.eclipse.swt.internal.Library.loadLibrary(Library.java:254)
                </span>

                Since SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) is something that you associate with Eclipse, I thought, I would install the eclipse-swt rpm. Unfortunately it didn't solve the issue so I went ahead and installed the full eclipse IDE. In the meantime, on my other machine (thanks VNC), I switched the JVM to a 32 bit version (not with /etc/alternatives but just by setting the JAVA_HOME and PATH enviorenmental variables) and tried running aptana again now both machines produce the identical error message.&nbsp; So I guess the only difference between the two at the start is that I had switched to a 32 bit JVM on one of them and completely forgotten about it.

                While doing this, I revisited aptana.com to see if there might be anything in the support forums. What I did find is that I had downloaded the wrong file! yep. I had downloaded a 32bit version while there is a 64 bit version also available! serves me right!

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Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

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            Recently, Netbeans 6.7 was made released without support for JavaFX this is perhaps the first tacit admission by sun that JavaFX is a failed technology. They are acknowledging that most of the netbeans users are using it for java and for PHP but not to develop JavaFX scripts. Netbeans 6.5.1 does support JavaFX but with bugs. It's difficult enough to sort out the bugs in your own code but when you have to <a href="javafx-or-javawtf.html">fight the IDE</a> it's no fun at all.

            There is no doubt that JavaFX is a failure. Much as been written about it including how sun <a href="javafx-on-linux.-2.html">didn't get their strategy right</a>, how there are &nbsp; <a href="https://www.google.com/trends?q=JavaFX&amp;ctab=0&amp;geo=all&amp;date=all&amp;sort=1">precious few searches in google for javafx</a> (see an <a href="http://www.flex888.com/1262/trend-check-on-flex-silverlight-and-javafx-2009.html">analysis</a>) and so on. The language itself has loads of probles. For example. JavaFx doesn't have a % operator. Sure you can still calculate a modulo by using 'a mod b'. But sun was hoping that Java developer would embrace JavaFX so why make things difficult for them? Similarly it does not have the ternary operator. If you want to do a conditional assignment you need to do this:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">a = if( condition) value1 else value2</p>

            This is again something that is eminently forgettable and certainly less readable than the more familiar format:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">(conditional) ? value1 : value 2</p>

            Popular languages are popular because an experienced developer can switch from one to another with the minimum of effort. You don't need to RTFM every effing detail. Expressions that work in one language works in another. In JavaFX you need to look it up - now that wouldn't be so bad if the manual was readable , but it's nightmare to find anything in that ajaxified API doc. Worse still stuff like operators and syntax are not described there but there is a separate poorly organized document for that.

            There's no switch case yes who ever heard of a language that doesn't have switch case? Well I have, perl! so let me rephrase that, whoever heard of a modern language that doesn't have switch case. Heck even VB.Net has switch case&nbsp; (though they have called it Select Case (what can you expect from Microsoft?))

            Support for String manipulation in JavaFX is minimal to say the least so you are forced to rely on the java String class and it's methods but some of those methods return 'char' primitives and you cannot do any comparison with the return value. That's because both single quotes and double quotes are treated as Strings where as in Java single quote is used to identify a character. so for example the following code will fail
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">if(s.charAt(0) == "[")</p>

            The interpreter will tell you that you have "Incomparable Types: Character and String". Interestingly, even though the intepreter speaks of a Character type you don't find one listed on http://openjfx.java.sun.com/current-build/doc/reference/TypeChart.html&nbsp; !

            Some of the bits and pieces seems to have been borrowed from Javascript/Jquery, others form PHP other from Java and they have been tossed into a can and stirred till a most indecipherable soup emerged. So if you want to make a falling brick game or an Image Viewer JavaFX is the right language to use.&nbsp; If you want to do something serious, you better look at other options.

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The F in JavaFX

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            I've been using the same SSH keys for a long time and had a need&nbsp; to create a new one to connect to a new server. I did the usual things like adding the user account, setting a password on the server followed by using ssh-keygen on the local machine to create the key. Next, I went back in with the root account, copied the contents of the .ssh/id_dsa.pub and pasted it into a newly created .ssh/authorized_keys2. Then I carefully set the .ssh folders permissions to 700 and the authorized_keys2 file to 600, now it was time to try to login only to see an error:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-with-mic)</span></p>

            <span style="color: #000000;">Since this error message isn't particularly usefully, I looked into the /var/log/secure file to find this:</span>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">error: key_read: uudecode AAAAB3NzaC1kc3MAAACBAJOciWES5OqZiuLHF9DpB//3isft6qVbApeH9H6fdjmLEpLBWbCKmms8sDZyLa8bUe9DYqmQdEG+aMih4VmD+wGD5KzjUdSzmOrLOdEOh5YhkMb+/tJ5BY0GvAKCcgKd6QVAg0BDqBr7qVyPG/n failed</span></p>

            It was then that I realized that copying the output of cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub doesn't work. Why? because when you copy from the terminal output hard linefeeds are introduced at incorrect locations. If you resize your window you will see them. Simply take out the line feeds and you will be just fine. In other words the whole key is just one line of text, even though the terminal would wrap it into several lines. If hard breaks are introduced (as would happen when you copy from the terminal) it would end up with the key being corrupted and you will not be able to login.

            Now you might ask, isn't it a security issue for me to post my key here? no. what you are seeing is the public key not the private key. The public key is something that can be transferred over an insecure connection.

            By the way, if you are signing up with a new hosting company, and they send you the password through email run from there as fast as you can. Sending a password through email means anyone can get hold of it and just goes to show that the hosting company is careless about security. The correct way is for the hosting company to ask you to send your public_key to them. They can then install it on the server and you will then be able to login securely. But then again, we live in a world where people calling themselves webmasters or system administrators are perfectly happy to use FTP to manage websites.

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            You can speed up your website, by making your web server perform on the fly gzip compression. Any old web server including the lame IIS can do that. Similarly any old web browser including the badly designed, badly written Internet Explorer can transparently decompress this gzipped content. Unfortunately the same cannot be said about some HTTP client libraries. But it isn't as bad is it sounds. These client libraries simply avoid sending the '<em>Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate'</em> header and the server will respond by not deflating the content. So the only thing you lose is a bit of speed. Well you might lose a bit of money also if you pay by the gigabyte for your bandwidth.

            If you are building a web services client with PHP, you can try to combine the PHP HTTP wrapper the zlib extension to read and deflate gzip compressed data. One <a href="http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.gzopen.php">php.net contributed note</a> on php.net suggests to 'daisy chain' the <em>zlib://</em> and http:// wrappers ().
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><code>&lt;?</code>
                <code>&nbsp; &nbsp; echo file_get_contents("compress.zlib://http://raditha.com/", "r");</code>
                <code> ?&gt;</code>
            </p>
            Another approach is to rely on gzopen.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><code>&lt;?</code></p>
            <p style="padding-left: 60px;"><code>$zp = gzopen("http://raditha.com/", "r");</code>
                <code> gzpassthru($zp);</code>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><code>?&gt;</code></p>
            They will both echo out the HTML of the web page at http://raditha.com/ - but appearances can be deceptive. If you analyze the traffic with <a href="https://www.wireshark.org/">wireshark</a> (or any old packet sniffer), you will find that the '<em>Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate</em>' header is <strong>not</strong> being sent and it's counterpart '<em>Content-Encoding: gzip</em>' is not included in the response. The above code appears to work because the PHP Zlib extension will open uncompressed files without complaining. In other words, when it encounters uncompressed data, gzopen behaves exactly like fopen and gzread behaves like fread.

            So if you want to benefit from the deflate module on your webserver, you will need to use your own client library. How to create a client library is beyond the scope of this post, but I will explain how you can set and get the headers and decode the data. In order to make sure that the server compresses the content you need to do:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><code>fwrite($this-&gt;socket, "Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflatern");</code></p>
            Usually images and other binary files will not be gzipped, so you need to make sure that the server sends back the 'Content-Encoding: gzip' header before you actually try to decompress the message body.
            <pre style="padding-left: 30px;">$this-&gt;headerArray = split("rn", $this-&gt;headers);
foreach($this-&gt;headerArray as $head)
{
    $parts = split(": ",$head);
    if(strtolower($parts[0]) == 'content-encoding: gzip')
    {
        $gzip=true;
    }
}</pre>
            It's not a requirement to convert the headers to lower case before comparision; we are just playing safe because sometime you find weird servers not capitalizing the second word in the header. Once you have identified that the content is gzipped, you might be tempted to just use the <code>gzinflate</code>() method to inflate what you read in from the socket.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><code>gzinflate(stream_get_contents($this-&gt;socket, $length-10));</code></p>
            you will only run into an error
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">
                </span></p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">PHP Warning:&nbsp; gzinflate(): data error in /var/www/clients/twitter/RadHTTPClient.php on line 261
                    PHP Stack trace:
                    PHP&nbsp;&nbsp; 1. {main}() /var/www/raditha/http-deflate.php:0
                    PHP&nbsp;&nbsp; 2. RadHTTPClient-&gt;getMessageBody() /var/www/raditha/http-deflate.php::20
                    PHP&nbsp;&nbsp; 3. gzinflate() /var/www/raditha/RadHTTPClient.php:261</span></p>
            It happens because the <code>gzinflate</code>() function <em>doesn't expect to deal with the gzip header.</em> The header contains the gzip magic number as well as other flags such as file modification time etc. This header has to be stripped out before you pass it into the <code>gzinflate</code> function.
            <pre style="padding-left: 30px;">if($useGzip)
{
    $b = fread($this-&gt;socket,2);
    if(ord($b[0]) == 0x1f &amp;&amp; ord($b[1]) == 0x8b)
    {
        $gzHead = fread($this-&gt;socket,8);
        $s = gzinflate(stream_get_contents($this-&gt;socket, $length-10));
    }
}</pre>
            if the magic number 0x1f8b is not found you can treat the data as already uncompressed data (of course you will need to add the 'else' to go with it).

            One last thing; if you want to enable one the fly gzip compression with Apache all you need to do is to add the following directives to the httpd.conf file
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><code>LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so</code></p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><code>AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml</code></p>

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PHP HTTP Clients and on the fly gzip compression.

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            <p><a href="http://www.projecthoneypot.org?rf=50432">Project Honey Pot</a> - is a service that allows you to track and help catch spammers who harvest email addresses from your web pages. Better still it helps you to keep out comment spammers. I even thought to write a wordpress plugin for it but as happens with many a good idea; someone else has thought of it first! (checkout <a href="https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/httpbl/">http:BL</a> ) In order to use the WP plugin or to benefit from the Honey Pot you need an access key. They will provide you with one if you install a spam trap on your website. The trap is a just a simple script. One that doesn't impact your site and doesn't place any undue load on your server so it doesn't cost you anything.</p>
            <p>I have installed the 'honeytrap' at <a href="https://www.raditha.com/specimenfederation.php">http://www.raditha.com/specimenfederation.php</a> (yep it looks like a terms of use page but the bots will see it differently).</p>
            <p>Getting back to the http:BL plugin; what it does is prevent known spammers and email address harvesters from seeing your page. But this is not ideal, sometimes there may be rare cases of mistaken identity (after all Most ISPs asign dynamic IPs), It would perhaps be better to allow everyone (even IP addresses that are listed in project honey pot) to visit the site and read the comments but to prevent them from posting new comments. Maybe there is room for another plugin ....</p>
            <p>I always talk of writing WP plugins but so far, I have written only one....</p>

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Project HoneyPot - A honey trap for spammers

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            If developers are expected to embrace JavaFX, at least the compiler should be stable. Unfortunately it isn't.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Note: An internal error has occurred in the OpenJFX compiler. Please file a bug at the
                    Openjfx-compiler issues home (https://openjfx-compiler.dev.java.net/Issues)
                    after checking for duplicates. Include in your report:
                    - the following diagnostics
                    - file /tmp/javafx_err_532302993941075447.txt
                    - and if possible, the source file which triggered this problem.
                    Thank you.
                    /home/raditha/jbproject/FX/f1/src/FileTest.fx:19: VFLGS$0 is not public in FileTest.PGNGame; cannot be accessed from outside package
                    class PGNGame {
                    1 error
                    ERROR: javafxc execution failed, exit code: 1
                    /home/raditha/jbproject/FX/f1/nbproject/build-impl.xml43: exec returned: 255
                    BUILD FAILED (total time: 3 seconds)</span>

                Well, I am going to file a bug report as they suggest? Most definitely not. For one thing, I don't have the time to search for duplicates and file a report with hundreds of gory details including steps to reproduce the bug only to hear an idiotic developer say, it's not a bug report but something we have done wrong. Then 23 other people have to file the same report and 7 of them have to argue with the said developer before they finally agree to look into it and then release an update four months down the line.

                I hate M$ but I will be delighted to see SilverLight just bury JavaFX.

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JavaFX or JavaWTF

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            <p></p>
            <p>For more than six months whenever a visitor submitted a comment on this blog, he would be greeted with a 404 error. I blamed this on the advanced permalinks migration plugin and never got around to fixing it. It turns out that this may not be a fault of that plugin after all. It's something else that's broken; paginated comments (or at least this is the impression I got from reading several posts on different blogs on the topic).</p>
            <p>The solution it turns out is trivial (I am kicking myself for not fixing this earlier). I found it on <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/topic/254939">http://wordpress.org/support/topic/254939</a>; all you need to do is to turn off paginated comments!</p>
            <p></p>
            <p></p>

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Wordpress 404 error on comment submission

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            Wordpress added a nice feature a while back - the ability to upgrade your installation while logged into the admin console. If you make use of this feature you no longer need to mess around with downloading zip file, deleting the old stuff, loading the upgrade.php script etc etc. The same system can be used to upgrade plugins too.

            I never made use of this feature for two reasons, the first being that my wordpress installation is <a href="subversioned-wordpress-upgrade.html">subversioned</a> (revision control with subversion) and the second being that only FTP and FTP+SSL were supported by it. FTP+SSL isn't so bad but <a href="../../php/ftp/security.php">FTP is totally insecure</a>. Eventually I decided to use this update system for the plugins at least and thought I should add support for SFTP. The plan was to create a plugin that would add an SSH option to the upgrader. It was then that I found that SFTP support is already there but hasn't been enabled!

            <figure style="text-align:center"><img title="Hey wheres the SSH" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/wp-nossh.jpg" alt="no SSH">
                <figcaption>no SSH</figcaption>
            </figure>

            On my desktop computer (Fedora 11), where I keep a copy of all my websites, I had the SFTP option enabled in a less than a minute but on my production server it took a while longer. That was because because libssh2, which is the key requirement for the PHP SSH extension could not be installed with YUM. (This is <a href="001056.html">a Centos server</a>). While attempting to use YUM, I had to run a load of updates and worst of all reboot the server (something which hasn't been done for more than an year).

            libssh2/php ssh extention had to be installed manually and I followed the instructions in the /wp-admin/includes/class-wp-filesystem-ssh2.php file - the same set of instructions are found at <a href="http://kevin.vanzonneveld.net/techblog/article/make_ssh_connections_with_php/">http://kevin.vanzonneveld.net/techblog/article/make_ssh_connections_with_php/</a>. Unfortunately they both contain an error.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">cd /usr/src
                wget http://surfnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/libssh2/libssh2-0.14.tar.gz
                tar -zxvf libssh2-0.14.tar.gz
                cd libssh2-0.14/
                ./configure
                make all install

                The libssh2 download is really ancient - it wouldn't even compile on my Centos box - worse gcc even segfaulted while trying to compile it. I kid you not. I have never seen gcc segfault before.
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">make[1]: Entering directory `/root/libssh2-0.14/src'
                    gcc -o channel.o channel.c -c -g -O2 /usr/include -I/usr/include -Wall -I../include/ -fPIC
                    gcc: /usr/include: linker input file unused because linking not done
                    channel.c253:10: /usr/include: No such file or directory
                    channel.c:71: internal compiler error: Segmentation fault
                    Please submit a full bug report,
                    with preprocessed source if appropriate.
                    See for instructions.
                    make[1]: *** [channel.o] Error
                    make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/libssh2-0.14/src'
                    make: *** [all] Error</span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            <span style="color: #993300;"><span style="color: #000000;"> The correct way to go about it is to visit the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/libssh2">libssh2 project page on sourceforge </a> and download the latest version (happens to be 1.1 at the time of writing).&nbsp; The latest version could be compiled without any problems. After that you can do the pecl installation followed by editing the php.ini file
                </span></span>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">pecl install -f ssh2</p>


            <figure style="text-align:center"><img title="ssh , there it is " src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/wp-ssh.jpg" alt="wordpress and ssh">
                <figcaption>wordpress and ssh</figcaption>
            </figure>

            In my case, I had to give the full path to the ssh2.so file because the engine couldn't find the extension when only a relative path was given. That's because pear seems to have installed the shared object at a wierd location. Well in the end after the apachectl restart I now have the PHP SSH extension enabled and wordpress update page does show the ssh2 extension.

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Wordpress Auto Upgrade and SFTP

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            <p></p>
            <p>One of Google's own web masters has created a post at <a href="https://code.google.com/speed/articles/optimizing-php.html">http://code.google.com/speed/articles/optimizing-php.html</a>&nbsp;giving out several tips on how to optimize PHP scripts. Most of it is complete baloney and has been debunked by Gwynne Raskind via the <a href="https://groups.google.com/group/make-the-web-faster/browse_thread/thread/ddfbe82dd80408cc">Make the web faster group</a>&nbsp;. What some people will do in the name of optimizing code is absolutely ridiculous. At most they will save a thousandth of a second after putting in 2 days of effort. Here is the proof : <a href="http://raditha.com/wiki/Php_optimize">Should you optimize PHP?</a> and <a href="http://raditha.com/wiki/Readfile_vs_include">Readfile vs Include</a></p>
            <p>&nbsp;</p>
            <p>Both these articles were written quite a few years ago and Interestingly I have received a handful of hate mail from people who spend all their time optimizing code!</p>
            <p>&nbsp;</p>
            <p>If you want your code to execute fast, design a good algorithm or better still look one up in a book. There is no substitute for it. If your app is connected to a database make sure the schema is properly designed. If you are retrieving data from a remote server (eg; a database or a RESTful API) use a cache. All this applies not just to PHP but to any language in existence on any platform.</p>
            <p></p>

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Readfile vs Include and echo vs print; don't bother

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            Sun finally woke up and realized that they need to provide a JavaFX platform for linux. And me, someone who has been eagerly looking forward to it, missed the event completely! That was mostly because I jumped from Netbeans 6.5 to Netbeans 6.7 alpha releases and progressed to 6.7 RC2. In the meantime, Netbeans community/Sun quitely released Netbeans 6.5.1 with support for JavaFX and I wasn't monitoring this branch. I stumbled across this only while browsing through the <a href="https://www.netbeans.org">netbeans</a> site. Note to self: you must subscribe to more tech news channels.

            Not releasing a Linux version at the same time as they released a windows version is a huge blunder. But blundering is what Sun is known for.&nbsp; It is&nbsp; the company that goes out of it's way to pretend to be supportive of open source. By forgetting that a huge percentage of people on linux are geeks, they have effectively ensured that there will be a fewer number of applications written for the JavaFX platform than for Air or Silverlight. SilverLight doesn't work on Linux at all (obviously!) and Adobe Air doesn't work on 64 bit linux. Here was a chance to capture an untapped market and sun has largely missed that opportunity.

            The first and the last time <a href="javafx-on-linux..html">I dabbled with JavaFX</a> was more than six months ago and I didn't get far (was fed up with the lack of support for linux and gave up). So it was time for me to just quickly run through the examples as a refresher, but again I couldn't get far. Netbeans complained:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">Trying to override old definition of task nbjavafxconnect
                Trying to override old definition of task nbjavafxstart
                Trying to override old definition of task nbjavafxreload
                Trying to override old definition of task nbjavafxappreloaded
                init:
                deps-jar:
                compile:
                jar:
                standard-run:
                Error: JAVA_HOME is not defined, cannot find "java" command.
                BUILD FAILED (total time: 3 seconds)
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            But I do have the JAVA_HOME environment variable defined and no other version of Netbeans has ever complained about it being missing. If you google for this error you will mostly see results from the last decade - that was when people (or java apps) had trouble with environmental variables and classpaths. So instead of going forward sun is going backwards with JavaFX.

            I solved this problem by editing the<em> /usr/local/netbeans-6.5.1/bin/netbeans</em> script and adding the following at the top:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java.6</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            You will notice that I don't rely on the <a href="1434.html">/etc/alternatives mess</a>. Anyway, once this was done the sample code did run and even the preview which did not show up previously suddenly became active.

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JavaFX on linux.

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            <h2>bti</h2>
            It is said that everyone talks on twitter but no one listens.&nbsp; It's true. The existence of&nbsp; <a href="https://gregkh.github.com/bti/">bti</a> is the proof. bti is short for Bash Twitter/Identica Idiocy. It 'allows you to pipe your bash input to twitter or identi.ca in an easy and fast manner to annoy the whole world' It's author <a href="https://twitter.com/gregkh">@gregkh</a> uses it for just that and he has 162 masochistic followers. If you also want to do the same, the bti man page suggests:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">hook bti up to your bash shell, export the following variable:</p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">PROMPT_COMMAND=´history 1 | sed -e "s/^s*[0-9]*s*//" | bti --bash´</p>

            <h2>Choqok</h2>
            Iran is a hot topic on twitter these days and thousands of users have added a green tint to support Iranian demonstrators (they are hoping the ayatollah will get a headache after looking at those avatars). It might be appropriate for those users (I am one of them) to adapt <a href="http://choqok.gnufolks.org/">choqok</a> as their twitter client.&nbsp; Choqok is said to be the ancient persian word for sparrow. This is a pretty decent software. If the authors could add suppport for groups, this could become a very good software.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" style="margin-top:15px; margin-bottom:15px" title="Choqok" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/choqok.jpg" alt="For those with green tinted avatars" width="450" height="486"></p>

            <h2>Gwibber</h2>
            If you don't like choqok, you might like <a href="https://launchpad.net/gwibber">Gwibber</a>
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" style="margin-top:15px; margin-bottom:15px" title="Gwibber" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/gwibber1.jpg" alt="Gnome Twitter Client" width="450" height="481"></p>

            Gwibber is a nice and simple client that can also be used to connect to other social network sites like Facebook, Flickr , Ping.fm (and few others). If you are a social network junkie this is for you. The downside to gwibber is that it doesn't have an direct messages tab (but everyone talks, no one listens and DM is mostly from spammers so who cares?). When the timeline is updated, the new tweets are shown as a floating popup even when gwibber is not minimized. Those tweets will not show up in the main window until you refresh. Fortunately this behaviour can be disabled by ticking off the 'Display Bubbles' option. Just wish they hadn't made it the default.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" style="margin-top:15px; margin-bottom:15px" title="Bubbles" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/gwibber2.jpg" alt="Annoying Bubbles" width="350" height="315"></p>

            <h2>Mitter</h2>
            <a href="https://code.google.com/p/mitter/">Mitter</a> is another gnome client but it's rather basic and doesn't have even the @replies tab. @replies are important because it shows that someone is listening to what you are saying. There are plenty more packages that you an easily install with yum but none of them seem to have any outstanding features. If you've seen one you have seen them all. One of them (twitux) didn't run at all but didn't even produce an error message (not even when run from the command line) to tell me what's wrong.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" style="margin-top:15px; margin-bottom:15px" title="Mitter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/mitter.jpg" alt="Yet another gnome twitter client" width="450" height="456"></p>

            <h2>Pidgin</h2>
            Another software perhaps worthy of mention is Pidgin - the unified IM system for Gnome. A plugin named purple-microblog is supposed to add support for twitter. Unfortunately even after adding the rpm, a twitter option didn't appear in the selection drop down. But there are plenty of other plugins for twitter on the web and this is certainly worth giving another try.

            <h2>Lameduck</h2>
            What's good about these clients is that they are most definitely not bloatware. Which is the complete opposite of tweetdeck. For tweetdeck you need first install the Adobe Air Runtime (and you cannot do that <a href="fedora-11-and-tweetdeck..html">on 64 bit linux</a>) Followed by tweetdeck itself which is about 3MB. In stark contrast, mitter is only 107Kb (that's kilo bytes not mega bytes) and gwibber is 262kb. Sure they have dependencies but those dependencies are likely to be installed by default on most systems.

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Twitter Clients for Linux

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            <p></p>
            <p>During the last few weeks, moving from <a href="the-never-ending-problems-with-fedora-updates..html">Fedora 10 to 11</a> took up rather too much of my time, energy and space on this blog. But that's not the only thing that I have been updating. This blog is powered by wordpress and recently they released version 2.8 and naturally it has to be updated too. They have made updating a lot easier; you can now do it right from the admin area but there is a catch. You need to have an FTP or FTPs server running which I don't have. FTPS isn't bad but I would run a mile before connecting to a server over FTP. It never fails to astonish me how many webmasters are totally ignorant of the <a href="1151.html">lack of security of FTP</a>.</p>
            <p>So the wordpress update had to be done manually but it's not very difficult. Manual updating also makes it easier to keep the revision control system on the site updated as well. In my case I <a href="subversioned-wordpress-upgrade.html">use subversion</a> and it takes just a couple of commands to clean up the old stuff and commit the new version. But why should you do it? Why not mark the blog folder as a folder that should be ignored by the RCS? well in my case, I play around with the wordpress code, the themes and the plugins so I need to keep track of them in the source tree. Lots of other geeks do the same.</p>
            <p>Also being updated is the rest of the site, it's been sadly neglected for a long long time and I added a new article a few days back. It's time to follow that up with a few more so stay tuned.</p>
            <p></p>

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Updating this, Updating that

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            Updated my media server which was previously running Fedora 10 to Fedora 11. A whole floor separates this from my usual perch. So to avoid, running up and downstairs I did a remote install using VNC. The installation guide suggests starting up with <em>vncconnect=hostname</em> as a command line parameter. When you do that you need to start the VNC client on another computer to listen to an incoming connection. In other words we are seeing a reversal of the traditional client server roles (<a href="https://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f11/en-US/html/VNC_Whitepaper-installation.html">FedoraProject</a>). But it didn't quite happen that way; The installer did not connect to my VNC client (yes, IPTables was off) but it did start up a VNC server and did allow a connection from my client.

            The display was not the only thing that was sent over the network. All the RPMS were too. Installing from DVDs is painfully slow, it's much faster to install over the network. So I mounted the ISO (downloaded with JIGDO) under /var/www/html/ so that the installer can fetch the files from there. It didn't take too long to update nearly 1700 rpms but the post installation process seemed to take for ever and at one point I wasn't even sure if it had hung. As usual it messed up grub. Every time fedora is updated, you need to boot into rescue mode and do a '<em>grub-install</em>' to fix it.

            Now you wouldn't expect a system that was updated through VNC to refuse to allow you to connect to it after the install stallation&nbsp; is complete but this one did:
            <div style="padding-left: 30px;">IMSETTINGS_DISABLE_DESKTOP_CHECK:
                DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS: unix:abstract=/tmp/dbus-zju2U6PGN3,guid=3ef6632ab456fc90910b2b4a375371
                GTK_IM_MODULE: gtk-im-context-simple
                QT_IM_MODULE: xim
                XMODIFIERS: @im=none
                IMSETTINGS_MODULE: none
                IMSETTINGS_INTEGRATE_DESKTOP: yes

                ** (gnome-session:2515): WARNING **: Cannot open display:</div>
            This is because the default VNC software has changed from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11. (<a href="https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22530227-VNC-server-problems-after-upgrade-to-Fedora-11">DSLReports Forum</a>) The solution was to manually install tigerVNC.

            The usual course of action after an installation or an update is to follow it up with an '<em>yum update</em>' during this process, I found a lot of dependency problems. The first complaint was that yum couldn't find some RPMS which were supposed to have been installed.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">--&gt; Missing Dependency: libMagickCore.so.1()(64bit) is needed by package xine-lib-1.1.16.3-18.fc10.x86_64 (atrpms)
                xine-lib-1.1.16.3-18.fc10.i386 from atrpms has depsolving problems
                --&gt; Missing Dependency: libcdio.so.7(CDIO_7) is needed by package xine-lib-1.1.16.3-18.fc10.i386 (atrpms)
                PIL-1.1.6-9.fc10.x86_64 from atrpms has depsolving problems

            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">...Error: Missing Dependency: libodbc.so.1()(64bit) is needed by package 1:asterisk-1.4.25.1-78.fc10.x86_64 (atrpms)
                Error: Missing Dependency: /usr/bin/python2.5 is needed by package PIL-1.1.6-9.fc10.x86_64 (atrpms)
                Error: Missing Dependency: libcdio.so.7(CDIO_7)(64bit) is needed by package xine-lib-1.1.16.3-18.fc10.x86_64 (atrpms)
                You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
                You could try running: package-cleanup --problems
                package-cleanup --dupes
                rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            Opinion is devided about the usefulness of AtRpms, I first started using it when RPMFusion was not around so I had no choice but this seems like a good time to discontinue it. Disabling the atrpms repo didn't do any magic either.&nbsp; Another different set of dependency problems crept up.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">---&gt; Package openbios-common.noarch 0:1.0-1.fc set to be updated
                ---&gt; Package plymouth-plugin-two-step.x86_64 0:0.7.0-0.2009.05.15.1.fc set to be updated
                ...

            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">--&gt; Missing Dependency: libmikmod.so.2()(64bit) is needed by package 1:xmms-libs-1.2.11-36.99_8.fc8.x86_64 (installed)
                mythmusic-0.21-201.fc10.x86_64 from installed has depsolving problems
                --&gt; Missing Dependency: libfaad.so.0()(64bit) is needed by package mythmusic-0.21-201.fc10.x86_64 (installed)
                ....
                Error: Missing Dependency: libfaad.so.0()(64bit) is needed by package mythmusic-0.21-201.fc10.x86_64 (installed)
                Error: Missing Dependency: libpri.so.1.0()(64bit) is needed by package 1:asterisk-1.4.20-63.fc9.x86_64 (installed)
                Error: Missing Dependency: libmikmod.so.2()(64bit) is needed by package 1:xmms-libs-1.2.11-36.99_8.fc8.x86_64 (installed)

                <em>--skip-broken</em> doesn't really work. Even when it does work, what it really does is to sweep the whole mess under the carpet only to resurface later. These dependency resolution problems were unending. I uninstalled and reinstalled all kinds of packages countless times to whittle down this dependency problems. Most of the depsolving problems seem to be related to vlc, mythtv and other multimedia packages. Strangely some of the installed dependencies had an f9 tag to it. Despite my best efforts the <a href="2160.html">f9-f10 update apparently had left behind a lot of garbage</a>. I had trouble with an RPM key enpassant.
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: Header V3 RSA/SHA256 signature: NOKEY, key ID 8fcff4da
                rpmfusion-free/gpgkey&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; | 1.7 kB&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 00:00
                Public key for avidemux-cli-2.4.4-6.fc.x86_64.rpm is not installed

                The key file had strangely gone missing and the 'repo rpm' had to be downloaded and reinstalled before I could go onto the next round of sorting out the dependencies. After many such rounds I finally arrived at a stage where yum was trying to install some 960 MB of updates.
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm</p>

            Now yum was reporting conflicts for kdeutils-6:4.2.3-1.fc.i586 and kdeutils-6:4.2.3-1.fc.x86_64 - they are both the same package but different architectures and really shouldn't be installed together. What's happening now is that some of the older f7, f8 and f9 rpms 'survivors' were 32 bit versions and somehow or other yum got it into it's head that this is 32 bit system. After another dozen or so rounds of 'rpm -e', 'yum remove', 'yum install' and 'yum updates'. Finally got to a stage where the system update could proceed but only after a few more enpassants. Some of which were caught by using the --noscripts parameter to rpm
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">ERROR with rpm_check_debug vs depsolve:
                kdegraphics-libs is needed by (installed) kdegraphics-extras-7:3.5.9-1.fc8.i386
                kdegraphics-libs is needed by (installed) kdegraphics-extras-7:3.5.9-1.fc8.i386
                Complete!
                (1, [u'Please report this error in http://yum.baseurl.org/report'])
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            After all these cleanups I found that nearly 2GB of disk space had been freed!

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The never ending problems with Fedora Updates.

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            <p></p>
            <p>When the Camera on my phone died, it <a href="no-more-nokia.html">turned me off the E71 and even Nokia</a>. But now the camera has been replaced by Nokia Care and my <a href="faith-restored-in-nokia.html">faith in them has been restored</a>. I am beginning to get quite a liking for this phone. This is the first time I've been so happy with a phone since the days of my Siemens S55 (now that was a real phone).</p>
            <p>At first I had my reservations about the qwerty keyboard but it really does make life a lot easier. It's a bit bigger than my previous phone (an <a href="1439.html">E51</a>) but by no means bulky. The design is rather ergonomic and you hardly feel it in your pocket (as a result, I always leave it lying about here and there).</p>
            <p>The qwerty keyboard and the large screen makes it a pleasure to use the phone with Fring. Fring did cause the system to freeze up the first time I installed it but I have not seen a recurrance. However I have not yet been able to configure it's built in SIP client to connect to Asterisk. The large screen makes the phone a hit with the kids. They play tetris on it when stuck in traffic.</p>
            <p>If the screen is big the battery is even bigger. With bluetooth and wifi, the E51 can hardly run for a day. The 71 on the other hand seems to be able to keep itself going to at least two.&nbsp; I did have a spot of bother with the phone refusing to power itself on at times but this went away after a firmware update. Updating the firmware is not easy - you need to have a windows machine for it. Do people still use windows?</p>
            <p>The file manager is readily accessible from 'home' it's not buried ten deep in the menu tree like in most other phones. The TTS engine is pretty cool if you want to have your text messages or emails read out to you. Configuring email was quite a breeze. I started of with my gmail address and the phone auto detected all the settings. I am still trying to figure out how it did that.</p>
            <p></p>

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In praise of the E71

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            When you try to run VLC does it give you this disheartening error message?

            <div style="margin: 20px; text-indent: 0px; padding-left:10px;"><span style="color: #ff0000;">No suitable decoder module:</span>
                <p></p>
                <p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 0px; padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #000000;">VLC does not support the audio or video format "MP42". Unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this.</span></p>
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            Have no fear. This is something that is quite easily fixed! First step is to run VLC in verbose mode you will then see a more informative error message.

            <div style="margin: 20px; text-indent: 0px; padding-left:10px; color:#330000">[0x1adb098] main libvlc warning: cannot load module `/usr/lib64/vlc/codec/libavcodec_plugin.so' (libavcodec.so.52: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)
                [0x1adb098] main libvlc warning: cannot load module `/usr/lib64/vlc/demux/libavformat_plugin.so' (libavcodec.so.52: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)
                [0x1adb098] main libvlc warning: cannot load module `/usr/lib64/vlc/video_filter/libopencv_wrapper_plugin.so' (libcxcore.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)
                [0x1adb098] main libvlc warning: cannot load module `/usr/lib64/vlc/video_filter/libopencv_example_plugin.so' (libcxcore.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)
                [0x1be4c88] main demux warning: no access_demux module matching "file" could be loaded</div>

            I found out through 'yum whatprovides' that the libavcodec files are supposed to be provided by ffmpeg-libs (which is installed). In fact, I have already, removed this and reinstalled it because earlier <a href="fedora-11-woes.html">yum was throwing an error while installing vlc</a>. Apparently despite the re-installation, the required symbolic links had not been created. So I did the <a href="1579.html">old rpm2cpio trick</a>. Similarly, i found that the libcxcore files are provided by opencv and did the same again with it.

            So what exactly is this rpm2cpio trick? it's a method to manually install files from an rpm. It's usefull if you have a corrupt rpmdb or want to install an RPM but not it's dependencies.

            <div style="margin: 20px; text-indent: 0px; padding-left:10px;">rpm2cpio /var/cache/yum/./fedora/packages/opencv-1.0.0-15.fc.x86_64.rpm &gt; opencv.cpio
                cat opencv.cpio | cpio -idv
                rsync&nbsp; lib65/ /usr/lib64/&nbsp; -avz
                <p></p>

                Now try to open that video again and you will see that it plays without any errors. We have quite easily fixed the error that VLC said we wouldn't be able to fix. But what exactly caused it in the first place? In my case it was upgrading from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11 - Some of the RPMs had not been installed properly.

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        <ul class="pager">
            <li style="float:right"><a href="in-praise-of-the-e71.html">In praise of the E71&nbsp; »</a></li>
            <li style="float:left"><a href="faith-restored-in-nokia.html">« &nbsp; Faith Restored in Nokia</a></li>
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Fixing VLC does not support the audio or video format error

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            <p>Recently, <a href="is-that-a-phone-or-a-lemon.html">the Camera on my Nokia E71 died</a>. Even though Nokia refuses to admit that it's a known issue, it's something that happens very often if the number of results in google is anything to go by. There was a problem in claiming the warranty because the phone was purchased in the US and Nokia care in South Asia are not authorized to repair phones under warranty if they were purchased in the US!</p>
            <p>Fortunately after a few rounds of emails Nokia finally relented and agreed to allow the warranty to be claimed from Nokia Care in Sri Lanka. So finally the phone was sent there yesterday and by this afternoon they had fixed it. What was the solution? To replace the camera. In the end after nearly a month of waiting for them to act, it took them less than a day to fix it. I do appreciate Nokia going out of it's way to accommodate the warranty claim, so unless Siemens, suddenly decide to start making mobiles again my next phone<a href="no-more-nokia.html"> is likely to be a Nokia (again</a>).</p>
            <p>I must appreciate the actions of the following people and organizations:</p>
            <p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/">Amazon</a> , who readily agreed to refund the purchase price if the phone was returned. We didn't exercise this option because it wasn't practical.</p>
            <p><a href="http://www.nokiausa.com/">Nokia USA</a> for agreeing to allow the warranty to be claimed from Nokia Care Sri Lanka.</p>
            <p>Kanishka and Tharan - Two customer support executives at Nokia Care Sri Lanka.</p>
            <p>Last but not least - my father who bought this phone as a present for me during his last visit to the states, and sent so many emails to Nokia and Amazon to try to get this fixed.</p>
            <p></p>

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Faith Restored in Nokia

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            <p></p>
            <p>As you know, I have an <a href="is-that-a-phone-or-a-lemon.html">E71 with a dead camera</a>, which is apparently a known issue in many Series 60 phones (but something which Nokia does not wish to acknowledge as such). This phone was purchased in the US and as a result there is a problem with claiming the warranty from Sri Lanka (their official policy doesn't allow it (lame)). After several emails, Nokia finally agreed to allow the warranty claim from Sri Lanka and I visited the Nokia Care center in Colombo today. If not for the airconditioned atmosphere and comfortable seats in the waiting area, I might have mistaken it for a government office.</p>
            <p>It's a good thing the seats have to be comfortable because you have to wait. You have to get a token and wait for them to call your number. I waited for nearly half and hour before finally calling it quits the number progressed by only 4 during that time and there was two more to go before my number was to be called. All that waiting is just to hand over the phone to the agent&nbsp; at the counter. He will then look at it, ask a few questions and send it to the backroom. You have to wait again until the backroom boys take a look and get back with their comments. All in all the process seems to take about two hours. To make matters worse, there are eight counters but only six of them were staffed. This sort of thing has become a standard practice in Sri Lanka no one seems to realize that time is money.</p>
            <p>Later, the phone was sent back to Nokia Care with someone who was prepared to spend two hours there. Now it's in their hands let's see how it goes. As a footnote, it must be mentioned that Amazon really is a customer-centric company. They readily agreed to refund the money but we chose to get the phone fixed instead of sending it back because sending it back wasn't practical.</p>
            <p></p>

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A visit to Nokia Care.

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            <p>Trying out different graphical subversion clients the first one that I tested was rapidsvn. Seems like a pretty decent tool but it had one shortcoming - it will not allow me to enter an unversioned directory. If you are like me, when you go off on a tangent you probably create a few things in a directory that is not immediately added to the repository. If whatever experiment you are trying out , works out, that folder will be added but if it does not work out, you will probably forget about it. When cleaning up such content, you often need to inspect it first but if rapidsvn doesn't allow you to enter the directory, you need to do it on the command line or through another client.</p>
            <p>KdeSVN on the other hand does let you work with a mix of files and directories that may or may not have been subversioned. It's user interface isn't as good looking as that of RapidSVN. The folder tree is displayed horizontally instead of being vertical as it should be. I might learn to live with that. It's not easy to figure out how to make branches or tags (you need to open the repository first), but once you do it's managable. By the way, Konqueror allows you to update and commit in a working copy but it does not have the full set of functionality. Besides, I am not use KDE at the moment.</p>
            <p>Next I tried subcommaner. Unlike the other two clients, adding a new project takes several steps and at the last step, subcommander disappeared from my screen when i clicked on the 'Get url from working copy'. Yep, the software crashed. It did work fine when I copied and pasted the path that I got from subversion info, but then I realized that subcommander wasn't looking for the exact url for the trunk folder (it wanted the parent). In any case, source code is too important to be entrusted to a revision control system that seems to have a few teething problems. But subcommander is in beta and when the full version comes out the problems will hopefuly have disappeared. i certainly hope so because it has the best UI of the three.</p>
            <p>So far all the clients that I have tried out can be installed easily with yum. Now I need to look beyond that. eSVN is the first one that I compiled from source, unfortunately it turned out to be a waste of time - both browse respository and browse working copy failed silently and didn't open the directory as it was supposed.</p>
            <p>The next attempt was to install Workbench but in order to compile it, I had to install a few dependencies first (yum install wxPython pysvn ). And by jove this looks good the UI is slick and there are no show stopping bugs.&nbsp; Looks like this is what I will be using from now on. It's repository management is weak but for that I would be able to use kdesvn. And of course for many day to day commits and updates I will still be using net beans anyway.</p>
            <p>All this was done while I was still using Fedora 10. This post lay around in my drafts folder till now, so I can do the same again on Fedora 11.</p>
            <p></p>

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Graphical Subversion

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            Since <a href="fedora-11-preview.html">updating to Fedora 11</a> a few days ago, this is what I have been seen when ever <a href="fedora-11-woes.html">trying to use VLC</a> (the system completely freezes up if I try to use totem!)
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">VLC media player.0.0-rc2 Goldeneye
                    Bus error
                </span>

                Trying updating, tried removing and re-installing. Tried jugging the repositories to see if using RPMs from a different source might have an effect. During these operations, yum repeatedly said the following:
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">
                </span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">/sbin/ldconfig: file /usr/lib64/libcxcore.so.1.0.0 is truncated</span></p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">/sbin/ldconfig: file /usr/lib64/libcxcore.so.1 is truncated</span></p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">/sbin/ldconfig: file /usr/lib64/libavcodec.so.52 is truncated</span></p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">/sbin/ldconfig: file /usr/lib64/libavcodec.so.52.20.0 is truncated</span></p>

            Tried to find out which RPM provides these shared objects but yum again refused to corporate.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">http://ftp.isu.edu.tw/pub/Linux/Fedora/linux/development/x86_64/os/repodata/66da271dd9f7a6d6e50f822f10aa90d7fbfc0ba1d021947a63ceb49da8f86a-filelists.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
                    Trying other mirror.
                    ....</span>

            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">http://mirror.yandex.ru/fedora/linux/development/x86_64/os/repodata/66da271dd9f7a6d6e50f822f10aa90d7fbfc0ba1d021947a63ceb49da8f86a-filelists.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
                    Trying other mirror.
                    0d7fbfc0ba1d021947a63ceb49da8f86a-filelists.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
                    Trying other mirror.
                    Error: failure: repodata/66da271dd9f7a6d6e50f822f10aa90d7fbfc0ba1d021947a63ceb49da8f86a-filelists.sqlite.bz2 from fedora: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.</span>

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            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">
                </span>

                This particular error is easy to fix. Just do a ' <em>yum clean metadata</em>'. clean metadata is the remedy for many of the problems with yum specially the file not found problems. Sometimes it can be used to resolve conflicts too. But it didn't resolve the problem with the truncated so files (shown in second error dump). Looking close I found that even after doing a yum remove vlc the offending shared objects are still there. They were promptly disposed of and VLC was installed yet again. This time thankfully the truncated so error message didn't pop up and VLC finally started up without that annoying bus error.

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Starting up VLC on Fedora 11

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            After going into all that <a href="fedora-11-woes.html">trouble with Fedora 11</a>. I landed back on square one thanks to Palimpsest. Since the time I upgraded to F11, It kept warning me about a hard drive that is on the verge of failure. Now I am someone who has suffered a lot from drive failures the most recent one was in <a href="1643.html">October</a>. None of those drives so much as mummered before failing so I thought I would take the warning seriously, specially because this drive is now <a href="000840.html">4 years old</a>. Once upon a long ago, it was the largest drive that I had weighing in at 120GB. Now it's the smallest. The new drive is 500GB and cost about as much as the old one did. When you consider the fact that inflation is always 20% or higher in our country, a gigabyte now costs about 1/10th of what it used to do.

            As fate would have it the faulty drive was the very drive that had the '/' partition. All the files in it were rsynced onto the new drive after booting with the DVD in rescue mode. The /etc/fstab file was edited, taking care to use the UUID instead of the drive name. That's necessary because plugging / un-plugging drives causes their drive letters to change. I kept the old drive in but booted off the new drive and used it for a couple of days before unplugging it. That's when I started getting a blank screen on bootup.

            It was time to reboot with the DVD and to try to update grub. Yet grub installed refused to do it's task:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;"><strong><strong>Could not find device for </strong></strong></span></p>

            Now that message appears to be truncated. There should be a device name at the end but it's simply not there. I had very foolishly formatted the drive as ext4 I am beginning to think that Fedora 11 isn't quite ready for it yet. Even so the /boot partition is ext2 (the Fedora installer refused to format it as ext4)

            Then I found a <a href="https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=504678">post</a> which explains how to manually installed grub. Even after following those steps, all i got was just another blank screen on boot up. I tried once more and installed the boot loader into all three of the drives I have. Then toggling through the boot sequence, I finally managed to get a grub menu on bootup instead of blank screen. I suppose you can call that progress. By manually entering the kernel and initrd parameters, I could now get the machine to progress into the next step, only to see it freeze up just before the services are started.

            Fedora 11 official release is just a few days away. The easiest thing at this stage would probably be to just wait for it, But I decided to take the plunge and reinstall with the preview DVD.&nbsp; Even then the installer bailed out several times apparently it's a time zone problem (more on that later). Once I sorted that out the installer proceeded very quickly probably because it recognized the RPMs that were already installed.

            I have a working machine once again, even though it still refuses to run VLC or tweetdeck and crashes when you try to use Mplayer.

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F11 and Back to Square 1.

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            <p></p>
            <p>No more Nokia for me. Nokia is to mobiles what M$ is to computers. They sell lousy phones for a hefty prices. I started using Nokia phones only after Siemens mobile finally hung up the towel. <a href="is-that-a-phone-or-a-lemon.html">The camera on my E71 stopped working</a> with in a month. This is a known issue and widely recorded on many websites and forums including on Nokia's own support forum. Yet Nokia support staff deny that it is a known issue. It's not something that just effects the E71, or just E Series phones other S60 phones are effected as well. <a href="https://www.google.lk/search?q=s60+%22Camera%3A+feature+not+supported%22&amp;ie=utf-8&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;aq=t&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;client=firefox-a">Just see for yourself</a></p>
            <p>While denying it's a known issue, they are happy to fix it but the only catch is they want the phone to be sent to the US. Why is that? well my father bought it for me while in the US a little over a month ago. The prices charged by the local agents are atrocious and the E71 like many other Nokias costs about 40% more over here.</p>
            <p>Unfortunately neither me nor my father have any immediate plans of a US visit. Claiming warranties from any Sri Lankan company is like pulling teeth so I am not keeping my fingers cross about being able to get this fixed free of charge from the local agents.</p>
            <p>This is not my first bad experience with Nokia phones. A 6151 I had sometime ago just fell apart. It's keyboard broke, the power button wore out and ringer stopped working. After that I had a lot of trouble with an E51 as well.</p>
            <p>This is in stark contrast to Siemens phones that I used long ago. They were virtually indestructible. I had an M55 which I dropped at least 40 times. I used to throw it up in the air and catch it like a ball. It was supposed to be shock proof. It really was.</p>
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No more nokia

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            Like with Fedora 10 playing videos is not easy on Fedora 11 either. VLC player simply will not start.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">VLC media player.0.0-r Goldeneye
                    Bus error</span>

                Tried to do a yum update hoping that this is a bug that has been fixed.
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
                    Setting up Update Process
                    Resolving Dependencies
                    --&gt; Running transaction check
                    ---&gt; Package rpmfusion-free-release.noarch 0:11-1 set to be updated
                    ---&gt; Package x264.x86_64 0:0.65-9_20090117.2245.fc10_92 set to be updated
                    --&gt; Processing Dependency: libx264.so.67()(64bit) for package: vlc-core
                    --&gt; Finished Dependency Resolution
                    vlc-core-1.0.0-0.5r.fc.x86_64 from installed has depsolving problems
                    --&gt; Missing Dependency: libx264.so.67()(64bit) is needed by package vlc-core-1.0.0-0.5r.fc.x86_64 (installed)
                    Error: Missing Dependency: libx264.so.67()(64bit) is needed by package vlc-core-1.0.0-0.5r.fc.x86_64 (installed)
                    You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
                    You could try running: package-cleanup --problems
                    package-cleanup --dupes
                    rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest</span>

                At the end of the error message it provides some suggestions unfortunately none of them worked. I did a yum whatprovides to find out what the missing RPM might be. There are several possible candidates and most of them appear to be for Fedora 10. I picked one almost by random and tried to install it and got the exact same error produced above. Hello! The very reason I am trying to install this RPM because the shared object is not there so don't tell me that it's not there!

                I tried removing VLC and trying to put it back in again. That resulted in the above yum error going away, but it failed to make the vlc error go away.

                Then I found the installed 264 libraries and yum removed them

                yum remove x264-libs-0.0.0-0.24.20090319gitc109c8.fc.x86_64 libx264_65-0.65-9_20090117.2245.fc10_92.x86_64

                There were&nbsp; a lot of dependencies and nearly all of them were F10 rpms. These were also removed by yum. Then I re installed vlc one more time. This time a lot of dependencies were installed which had the .f11 tag in their filenames. The installation wasn't successful.
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Transaction Check Error:
                    file /usr/lib64/libfaad.so.2.0.0 from install of faad2-libs-1:2.7-1.fc.x86_64 conflicts with file from package libfaad2-1:2.7-16.fc10_92.x86_64
                    file /usr/lib64/libavutil.so.49.15.0 from install of ffmpeg-libs-0.5-2.fc.x86_64 conflicts with file from package libavutil49-0.5-30.fc10_92.x86_64
                    file /usr/lib64/libswscale.so.0.7.1 from install of ffmpeg-libs-0.5-2.fc.x86_64 conflicts with file from package libswscale0-0.5-30.fc10_92.x86_64
                    file /usr/lib64/libpostproc.so.51.2.0 from install of ffmpeg-libs-0.5-2.fc.x86_64 conflicts with file from package libpostproc-0.5-30.fc10_92.x86_64</span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Error Summary</span></p>

            Removed these offending RPMs and trying installing VLC one more time. The installation was successful but vlc still refuses to start. Time to give up on this.

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Fedora 11 woes

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            Having become a twitter addict, tweetdeck was amongst the first batch of applications that I tried to&nbsp; install on my fresh Fedora 11 installation. But to install, tweetdeck you need to install Adobe Air and that got off to a bad start.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">[<a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="b9cbd6d6cdf9d5d6dad8d5d1d6cacd">[email&nbsp;protected]</a> ~]# /home/raditha/Download/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
                    Error loading the runtime (libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)</span>

                [<a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="5a2835352e1a3635393b363235292e">[email&nbsp;protected]</a> ~]# yum install libgtk-x11
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">No package libgtk-x11 available</span></p>

            this is because adobe air needs 32bit libraries (lame or what? ). In the past I have had trouble mixing 32 and 64 bit libraries but I decided to risk is and installed the 32 bit version manually with <em>yum install gtk2-2.16.1-4.fc.i586 </em> even then&nbsp; the installer still fails.<em>
            </em>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Error loading the runtime (libxml2.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)</span></p>

            I tried to fix it with:

            yum whatprovides "*/libxml2.so.2"

            yum install libxml2-2.7.3-2.fc.i586

            Only to run into another error or rather a series of errors.
            <div style="overflow: auto; padding-left: 30px; height: 200px;"><span style="color: #993300;">(setup:19453): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "clearlooks",</span>
                <span style="color: #993300;">(setup:19453): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "clearlooks",</span>

                <span style="color: #993300;">....</span>

                <span style="color: #993300;">(setup:19453): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "clearlooks",
                    Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module": libcanberra-gtk-module.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
                    Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "pk-gtk-module": libpk-gtk-module.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
                    Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "gnomebreakpad": libgnomebreakpad.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory</span>
            </div>
            All this lead to another round of yum install commands which resulted in about 60 MB of additional downloads.

            yum install libcanberra-gtk2-0.12-1.fc.i586.rpm
            yum install PackageKit-gtk-module-0.4.6-8.fc.i586
            yum install bug-buddy-2.26.0-2.fc.i586

            and this leads to another inevitable series of error messages
            <div style="overflow: auto; padding-left: 30px; height: 200px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Transaction Check Error:
                    file /usr/share/locale/am/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/ar/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/as/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/az/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/be/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/<a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="4e2c2b0e222f3a2720">[email&nbsp;protected]</a>/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/bg/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/bn/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/bn_IN/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/bs/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/ca/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/cs/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/cy/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/da/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/dz/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/el/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/en_CA/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/es/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/es_AR/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/es_CL/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/es_CO/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/es_CR/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64 </span></div>
            Is it any wonder that ordinary people don't use linux? This error had to be overcome by manually installing gweather using the rpm command and the --nodeps and --force flags. That had to be followed by installing the 32 bit version of the GTK engine. After doing all this what do I get? Another error of course.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/air-error.jpg" alt="an error occured while installing adobe air"></p>

            Please contact your administrator. What I am supposed to do give myself a call? After a lot of googling I discovered that the air installer will put more detailed error messages into a log file but only if a file by the name of ~/.airinstall exists on your system! how lame is that? JavaFX is bad enough but this is ridiculous. The error message was certainly detailed but not very useful.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Performing runtime install
                    UI SWF load is complete
                    UI initialized
                    starting user confirmation
                    runtime install entering error state: [ErrorEvent type="error" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text="Unhandled e
                    xception TypeError: Error #1009" errorID=1009]
                    begin quitting</span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            Now it's the time for me to begin quitting too - there is nothing about this error on google or even on the adobe site.

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Fedora 11 and Tweetdeck.

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            A couple of weeks ago, I downloaded Fedora 11 and a couple of days ago I managed to find the time to install it on my desktop. It was running Fedora 10 at the time and the upgrade, like all <a href="2160.html">past upgrades</a> didn't go smoothly. Since I have had so much trouble with Fedora updates in the past, my tactic is to first install on a virtual machine to test it out. Invariably the virtual machine installation proceeds smoothly it's only when you try the real thing that you run into trouble.

            To be accurate the upgrade did go smoothly and it was the post installation configuration/firstboot that failed. As usual, grub installation was messed up and the system didn't start up until I booted the DVD in rescue mode and re installed <a href="1803.html">grub</a>. This is par for the course. Every time I have updated fedora, I have had to do that. On booting up, It seemed that each service waits twenty seconds to start up. Some of them didn't start at all [FAILED] but when the system got to atd it got completely stuck and stopped responding at all.

            Booting again into rescue mode, I found that most of the symbolic links to the .so files in /usr/lib and /usr/lib64 are missing. Worse yet, some of the shared objects from Fedora 10 hadn't even been replaced. No wonder this is getting stuck. I tried to manually install or update the missing libraries but rpm itself was broken (rpmbuild.so missing). When that happened in the past I have been able to <a href="1579.html">use the rpm2cpio tool </a>to manually install the contents of an rpm. This had to be done on a second computer and the files brought over (with a USB stick ssh is also dead) to the effected machine. Unfortunately all that effort didn't get me anywhere because rpm still complained :
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #ff6600;">rpm: symbol lookup error: rpm: undefined symbol : rpmConfigDir</span></p>

            I never found out what causes it. After a lot of googling, I just gave up and reinstalled from scratch over the existing installation. I can afford to do that because my drives have been properly paritioned and I am not going to lose any data by doing this.

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Fedora 11 Preview

Is that a Phone or a Lemon

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            April 23 is world book and copyright day, so on the 24th, the government carries full page advertisements on major newspapers about some program they are about to launch. Half of that space is taken up by a photo ripped off from my old website.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/stolen.jpg"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/stolen-t.jpg" border="0" alt="advertisement that violates copyrights"></a></p>

            Here is the original :
            <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/gallery/colombo-fort-005.jpg"><img class="aligncenter" title="stolen" src="http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/gallery/colombo-fort-005-t.jpg" border="0" alt="The original photo of the fort"></a></p>

            Of course I can sue them, but the Sri Lankan government is made up of thugs, crooks and (retired) terrorists, so you can't expect the to obey the courts of law.

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When the government steals your content

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            <p>Once upon a long ago, I was an SLT ADSL subscriber. I was not at all happy with the service and when moving house last year, decided to leave the link behind. What I opted for was a Dialog Broadband WiMax connection. Sadly getting hooked up with them turned out to be a very <a href="1296.html">painfull affair</a>. In frustration I decided to go back to SLT and well, it was worse. In the end I emailed the Dialog CEO and finally managed to <a href="1313.html">get a WiMax connection from Dialog BB</a>.</p>
            <p>Getting online was just the first battle. Their WiMax service was far from trouble free. It suffered from frequent distruption but I put up with it until&nbsp; and the last straw was when they <a href="1460.html">messed up their billing</a> and an Rs 12,500 payment ended up in a black hole. At that point I switched to Lanka Bell. In fact, I had decided even before this incdence to get a Lanka Bell broadband connection as a backup - it just became my primary connection and the Dialog was discontinued (interestly they never collected their equipment).</p>
            <p>Lankabell had it's fair share of problems but the difference was that they were pretty attentive and fixed most issues quickly. Nevertheless there was a time when their service would suffer at <a href="2334.html">least one disruption per week</a>. At that point I realized that I needed a backup. But I was weary after having tried all the available services. Once I even <a href="2289.html">picked up an STL application</a> (no you can't download it). But in the end, I decided to wait for <a href="1829.html">Airtel to arrive</a>. I had to wait a long time and just as I was about to sign up for their service, I found out on <a href="https://www.twitter.com">twitter</a> that their service is probably worse than all the others. For example they only provide private network IPs which rules out using torrents. The speeds weren't supposed to be so good either.</p>
            <p>In the meantime, Lankabell finally figured out how to provide a reliable service and I didn't suffer any disruptions at all for the past three months or so. Nevertheless i have obtained an SLT link as well and how that connection was setup is another story in itself.</p>
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ADSL -&gt; WiMax -&gt; WiMax -&gt; ADSL

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            <p></p>
            <p>Last week we released a major update to <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/">Rad Upload</a>. It's been a long time since the last release (too long to be honest). During that time the browser market placed had changed quite a lot. There were quite a few changes under the hood as well. . Some of those changes, along with changes in the java virtual machine (why hey named it Java 6 update 10 instead of giving it a proper version number is anybody's guess) lead to some irritating inconsistencies.</p>
            <p>One of those annoyances was the proxy detection code breaking. We were in fact using some sun proprietary classes for proxy detection and that's something that's advised against in the API doc. At the time we had no choice cause browsers were reluctant to share proxy server information with applets. Fortunately java 5 onwards a new set of classes were made available that allowed access to proxy info but we never got around to rewriting the Rad Upload code to make use it. Till now that is.</p>
            <p>In the process we also added digest authentication support for proxy servers - something that wasn't available in the previous version. Most proxies that support digest auth will support basic auth as well (what some people call .htaccess authentication but in the case of proxies there isn't an htaccess file (but there usually is an htpasswd file))</p>
            <p>As always most people will be able to get the upgrade free of charge. The full change docs are <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/new.php">here ....</a></p>
            <p></p>

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Rad Upload 4.10

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            <p><a href="http://www.gogrid.com">Go Grid</a> is an alternative to <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/">Amazon EC2</a> and if you go purely by the explanation on the Go Grid website it's cheaper and better than EC2.&nbsp; Certainly there are some areas in which Go Grid is miles ahead of EC2. Their web based control panel is one example. Even a die hard geek can be put off by the EC2 API while even a non tech can probably launch a Go Grid virtual machine thanks to their web interface (but then let us not forget Cloudfront).</p>
            <p>Once you create an Go Grid instance it takes a long time for the virtual machine to actually start up and become usable. That means on demand scaling really isn't on demand. You cannot just create a lot of instances and leave them lying about because you will be billed regardless of whether the instance has booted up or has been shut down.</p>
            <p>Though the pricing comparison on Go Grid website shows their services to be cheaper, that is true only if you are a heavy user. The Go Gridd pricing in the comparison chart is based on their 'Enterprise plan' which has a minimum monthly commitment of USD 2500.&nbsp; Amazon also offers volume discounts so a fair comparison ought to have taken that into account. EC2 discounted prices are as low as $0.03&nbsp; per hour (vs 0.08 per hour on Go Grid)</p>
            <p>Another factor is the Go Grid charges you based on the amount of RAM that you use. While it's possible to start up any server with just 512MB of memory, in practice you are going to need much more. It will be at least 1 GB for linux servers and 2GB for windows servers so you real cost is going to be a lot higher.&nbsp; The CPU on Go Grid packs more power than one on an Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) but CPU is never the bottleneck. The bottleneck is always the RAM , the hard drive or available bandwidth.</p>
            <p>The other day, <a href="amazing-speed-of-amazon-virtual-drives.html">I did a drive speed test on an AMI</a> and found that the virtual drives were amazingly fast. The same test on Go Grid showed wildly fluctuating results 297MB/s to 509KB/s (yes that's right the first one is in mega bytes the second one is in kilo bytes).</p>
            <p></p>
            <div style="margin: 15px; overflow: auto; height: 120px;">
                <p></p>
                <p>[<a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="cdbfa2a2b98dfffcfafbf5">[email&nbsp;protected]</a>_1_15193_84622 ~]# hdparm -t -T /dev/hda2</p>
                <p>/dev/hda2:</p>
                <p>Timing cached reads: 17024 MB in 1.99 seconds = 8553.32 MB/sec</p>
                <p>Timing buffered disk reads: 530 MB in 3.00 seconds = 176.64 MB/sec</p>
                <p>[<a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="6d1f0202192d5f5c5a5b55">[email&nbsp;protected]</a>_1_15193_84622 ~]# hdparm -t -T /dev/hda2</p>
                <p>/dev/hda2:</p>
                <p>Timing cached reads: 14944 MB in 1.99 seconds = 7499.96 MB/sec</p>
                <p>Timing buffered disk reads: 2 MB in 4.02 seconds = 509.17 kB/sec</p>
                <p>[<a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="96e4f9f9e2d6a4a7a1a0ae">[email&nbsp;protected]</a>_1_15193_84622 ~]# hdparm -t -T /dev/hda2</p>
                <p>/dev/hda2:</p>
                <p>Timing cached reads: 12204 MB in 1.99 seconds = 6117.46 MB/sec</p>
                <p>Timing buffered disk reads: 52 MB in 3.02 seconds = 17.23 MB/sec</p>
                <p>[<a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="b2c0ddddc6f2808385848a">[email&nbsp;protected]</a>_1_15193_84622 ~]# hdparm -t -T /dev/hda2</p>
                <p>/dev/hda2:</p>
                <p>Timing cached reads: 13232 MB in 1.99 seconds = 6634.23 MB/sec</p>
                <p>Timing buffered disk reads: 158 MB in 3.01 seconds = 52.58 MB/sec</p>
                <p>[<a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="077568687347353630313f">[email&nbsp;protected]</a>_1_15193_84622 ~]# hdparm -t -T /dev/hda2</p>
                <p>/dev/hda2:</p>
                <p>Timing cached reads: 10904 MB in 1.99 seconds = 5468.99 MB/sec</p>
                <p>Timing buffered disk reads: 892 MB in 3.00 seconds = 296.97 MB/sec</p>
            </div>
            <p></p>
            <p>So what's my recommendation: well just try it out yourself, you might end up liking it even though I didn't.&nbsp; Go Grid is giving away a USD 50 coupon at the moment to make it possible for you to do just that without spending any money.<script data-cfasync="false" src="../../cdn-cgi/scripts/5c5dd728/cloudflare-static/email-decode.min.js"></script>
            </p>

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Go Grid vs Amazon EC2

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            Though people are always coughing up large sums of money, the real bottleneck in both servers and desktop computers is the hard drive. Hard drives find it hard to deliver data as fast as they can be processed. With servers you sometimes find that your network capacity is also used up well before the processor hits 100%. But all that changes with Amazon EC2. The hard drives on Amazon Machine Images is blazing fast. And it isn't even a real hard drive.

            Consider this typical speed test result:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #333333;">[<a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="87f5e8e8f3c7e3e8ead2aab6b5aab4b6aab4beaab7b7aab3c6aab5b5">[email&nbsp;protected]</a> ~]# hdparm -t -T /dev/sda2
                    /dev/sda2:
                    Timing cached reads:&nbsp;&nbsp; 874 MB in&nbsp; 2.01 seconds = 434.12 MB/sec</span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #333333;">Timing buffered disk reads:&nbsp; 746 MB in&nbsp; 3.03 seconds = 246.27 MB/sec</span></p>

            As you can see, the drive on the AMI can deliver at 246.27 MB/sec which is at least three times as fast as the drives on my desktop and about 50% faster than a software RAID (<a href="../../linux/drive-speed.php">see here for the result</a>).

            Amazon is truly Amazing

            For the record this test was done with Amazon ec2 small machine instance (instance id: ami-2b5fba42). It doesn't have hdparm by default&nbsp; and it had to be installed with yum. hdparm should be run several times and the average be taken. Detailed test report is below.
            <div style="margin: 12px; overflow: auto; height: 100px;">Test #1:
                [<a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="394b56564d795d56546c14080b140a08140a00140909140d78140b0b">[email&nbsp;protected]</a> ~]# hdparm -t -T /dev/sda2
                /dev/sda2:
                Timing cached reads: 874 MB in 2.01 seconds = 434.12 MB/sec

                Timing buffered disk reads: 746 MB in 3.03 seconds = 246.27 MB/sec

                Test #2:
                Timing cached reads:&nbsp;&nbsp; 900 MB in&nbsp; 2.00 seconds = 449.88 MB/sec
                Timing buffered disk reads:&nbsp; 808 MB in&nbsp; 3.00 seconds = 269.21 MB/sec

                Test #1:
                Timing cached reads:&nbsp;&nbsp; 816 MB in&nbsp; 2.01 seconds = 405.57 MB/sec
                Timing buffered disk reads:&nbsp; 770 MB in&nbsp; 3.02 seconds = 255.39 MB/sec

                On second partition on the same instance (/dev/sda1 ):
                Test #1:
                Timing cached reads:&nbsp;&nbsp; 820 MB in&nbsp; 2.00 seconds = 409.85 MB/sec
                Timing buffered disk reads:&nbsp; 488 MB in&nbsp; 3.00 seconds = 162.51 MB/sec

                Test #2:
                Timing cached reads:&nbsp;&nbsp; 806 MB in&nbsp; 2.01 seconds = 400.77 MB/sec
                Timing buffered disk reads:&nbsp; 716 MB in&nbsp; 3.01 seconds = 237.77 MB/sec

                Test #1:
                Timing cached reads:&nbsp;&nbsp; 908 MB in&nbsp; 2.02 seconds = 449.60 MB/sec
                Timing buffered disk reads:&nbsp; 746 MB in&nbsp; 3.00 seconds = 248.35 MB/sec</div>
            Cached reads average (mean) at 434.12 MB/sec and buffered at 256.96 MB/sec that is more than twice as fast as a Gigabit network card can deliver data

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Amazing speed of Amazon virtual drives

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            <p></p>
            <p>They say, release early, release often and Wordpress is one software that seems to follow that mantra pretty well. Fortunately upgrading from one version of Wordpress to another is a painless task - unless of course you have a customized installation. Upgrading a customized installation can be made easier if you use subversion.</p>
            <p>Normally, in order to upgrade, all you need to do is to delete the old stuff, copy over the set of scripts from the new version and invoke upgrade.php . But if you recursively delete all the old stuff you lose your version control info. So this is my approach to upgrading a customized WP installation which has been subversioned.</p>
            <p>1) copy the files that you have modified into a safe place (themes and plugins will make up the bulk of this)</p>
            <p>2) Download wordpress and unzip it, then change into the source directory and use rsync to copy over the new files while deleting obsolete files from the previous version. the --exclude '.svn' part will ensure that subversion info is not discard. If you are using another revision control system, you can use the appropriate directory here</p>
            <p>rsync . /var/www/raditha/blog/ -avz --exclude '.svn' --delete</p>
            <p>3) Then add new files into the repository with</p>
            <p>svn add `svn stat | grep '^?' | cut -d' ' -f8`</p>
            <p>4) copy back the themes and plugins (inclusive of the .svn folders).</p>
            <p>4) delete the obsolete ones with:</p>
            <p>svn rm `svn stat | grep '^!' | cut -d' ' -f8`</p>
            <p>5) Merging - unfortunately there is no easy recipe for this, you need to manually Kompare , Meld or diff the files to see if your code needs to be merged.</p>
            <p>6) commit.</p>
            <p>7) run upgrade.php</p>
            <p></p>

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Subversioned Wordpress Upgrade

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            <p></p>
            <p>Writing assignments, essays, thesis etc can be pretty annoying (of course there are people who enjoy that sort of thing but not me). And those nasty reports have to be filled up with plenty of references. Now referencing is a good thing, but the process of creating citations and bibliographies is not fun. So during the last semester I started working on <a href="http://www.deadlinedue.com">Deadline due</a>.</p>
            <p>What the heck is that? Well it's an Harvard Reference generator. Now, you will say hold your horse, aren't there quite a few of them around? Certainly, but with most of them you need to do a whole lot of typing. You need to manually fill up the title of the book , the author, publisher and so on and so forth. With <a href="http://www.deadlinedue.com">Deadline Due</a> on the other hand all, you need to do is to enter the book's ISBN number. Everything else will be taken care of.</p>
            <p>What if yo don't have the ISBN and have only the title of the book? that's fine. you can enter that title and still get the reference generated. You can even enter part of a title and still get a list of references from which you can choose your pick.</p>
            <p>The service is still in beta but it certainly is very usable. I used it for my last couple of assignments. And a few others did too.</p>
            <p></p>

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Deadline Due

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            <p></p>
            <p>Ever visit a site where the SSL certificate doesn't quite match the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of that site? Nowadays firefox will simply refuse to take you there unless you add an exception for that site. Even high profile sites like Google Adsense is effected by this.</p>
            <p>What happens when you try to retrieve a page on such a site using an <em>HttpsUrlConnection</em> ? you end up with a <em>SSLHandshakeException</em> But what you don't mind the host name mismatch? you know that the certificate does belong to the organization that owns the particular website, you are only using SSL because you don't want anyone to sniff your username or password. What you can do then is to replace the default <em>HostnameVerifier</em> with one of your own:</p>
            <p></p>
            <p></p>

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HttpsUrlConnection and SSL Hostname Verification.

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            <p></p>
            <p>On saturday, I noticed that I could no longer check mail on my account. My mail server also has a couple of websites and a mysql database running on it. Those servers apeared to work fine. I opened a remote shell and trying looking through the qmail logs and the syslogs for errors by couldn't find any. Then I decided to forget it for a while cause I had more urgent matters to attend to (mail usually leads to more work anyway). That turned out to be a very bad decision cause soon after that SSH also died.</p>
            <p>In the end I had to ask the web hosting company to restart the server. When it came back up apache was running and the machine could be pinged but SSH, POP, IMAP and SMTP were all dead.Â&nbsp; Without SSH I was dependent on the hosting company to put it right and fortunately their support is excellent. ( It's a small outfit in California calledÂ&nbsp; the <a href="http://www.webquarry.com">Webquarry</a> ). It turned out that one of the two hard drives on the server had just kicked off and died. Because the /home folder was on this drive SSH and the mail servers all stopped responding.</p>
            <p>If /home was the only thing on it, we could have chucked it out and ignored a few emails that have gone missing and be done with it. Unfortunately the drive had some other stuff also on it which meant the OS was barely usable. So a new OS had to be put in (good thing too - it had Fedora Core 6 on it all this while). Then the sites had to be restored from the local copies and last but not least the mail accounts had to be recreated. </p>
            <p>This toast hard drive has tought me several lessons though. The first and most important is that it really is time to move all the static content to Amazon S3 - it not only removes a huge load from the server(s) but also helps to make the hardware last longer; specially the hard drives. Hard drives on servers never get a moments rest and it's no suprise that they burn out.</p>
            <p></p>
            <p></p>

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Server Hard Drive Gets toasted

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            <p></p>
            <p style="text-align: left;">All of a sudden Wordpress refused to let me add a new post. It would take me to the add new page but would almost immediately make an XMLHtttpRequest and after that the TinyMCE editor just breaks up.</p>
            <p></p>

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Is that a Wordpress Bug?

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            <p></p>
            <p>Everyone loves wordpress and everyone hates it's poor performance. The reason that it is so slow is because half a dozen mysql queries are executed for each fragment of a blog post that it displays. So I thought of trying to compress the wp_posts table to find out if it has any impact on performance but before doing that, the speed without compression has to be measured. Here is a typical result (when tested with httperf)</p>
            <p></p>
            <p></p>

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WordPress Performance and GZip.

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            Despite a lot of lip service about being supportive of the open source movement Sun is yet to come up with an official release of Java FX for Linux till now.&nbsp; In spite of this JavaFX does show up in the Netbeans plugin installer, but when you try to install it the following error message pops up:
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/f10/netbeans-javafx.png" alt="some plugins require capability javafx.sdk"></p>

            An widely referred to blog post by <a href="http://www.weiqigao.com/blog/2008/12/11/javafx_0_on_linux_netbeans_plugin.html">Weiqi Gao</a> describes how the OS X version can be used on linux. Unfortunately even after religiously following those instructions it didn't quite work for me. I get this error.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/f10/netbeans-javafx2.png" alt="no java fx"></p>

            Looks like I am going to have to do my java fx experiments on my macbook.

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JavaFX On Linux.

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            <p><object data="https://www.youtube.com/v/y9RarK2wUHE&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" height="344" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425">
                    <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true">
                    <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always">
                    <param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/y9RarK2wUHE&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1">
                    <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true">
                </object></p>
            <p>What you see here is a speed test carried out using a free tool by <a href="https://www.speedtest.net">Speedtest.net</a>. It's rather predictably named as speedtest mini. At first glance these results are impressive it shows that I have a very fast Local Area Network (184 mbps down and 277 mbps up) but it's a lie. I do have a very fast LAN but this figure is a huge understatement. My LAN is faster. Much much faster. I have gigabite ethernet and the actual speed is at least three times the speed that's reported.</p>
            <p>The result is inaccurate because the test method isn't very scientific. It works by downloading several large files from the web server ( in my case hosted on a server in the LAN). File access is limited by the speed of the hard drives. Unfortunately most hard drives cannot deliver at 100 mbps - the upper limit for gigabit ethernet. <a href="../../linux/drive-speed.php">Hard drives operate much slower</a>.</p>
            <p>For broadband speedtest which is what most people use the tool for - the hard drives will not act as a bottleneck because broadband links typically operate at much much slower speeds and will not place an undue burden on the hard drives (even if multiple users are trying the test concurrently).</p>
            <p>For the upload test, the widget POSTs some data to the server. The data appears to be generated internally or it's uploading a file that it just cached into memory. The result is that the hard drive bottleneck doesn't play such a significant role&nbsp; - at least not for smaller uploads which are held in memory at the server rather than being saved to disk. And speed test doesn't try to upload a lot of data at once anyway because most servers are not equipped to handle a large incoming upload (see this link if you want to learn how to configure your server : <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/config.php">http://www.radinks.com/upload/config.php</a></p>
            <p>So how do I know that my LAN really is as fast I as I claim it to be. I used this simple PHP scripts (which mimics a 128MB file being downloaded to test it out)</p>
            <p>$s="0";</p>
            <p>for($i = 0 ; $i &lt; 16 ; $i++)</p>
            <p>{</p>
            <p>$s .= $s;</p>
            <p>}</p>
            <p>for($i = 0 ; $i &lt; 2048 ; $i++)</p>
            <p>{</p>
            <p>echo $s;</p>
            <p>}</p>
            <p>?&gt;</p>
            <p>And this is what wget reported:</p>
            <p>Saving to: `nofile.php'</p>
            <p>[ &lt;=&gt; ] 67,108,864 52.2M/s in 1.2s</p>
            <p>2009-01-04 14:45:13 (52.2 MB/s) - `nofile.php' saved [67108864]</p>
            <p>52.2 MB/s that's already three times as fast as what speedtest reports but this is not accurate either. That's because wget is still saving the file to the local drive (which again acts as the bottleneck). Even that can be avoided by redirecting output to /dev/null/</p>
            <p>wget http://radmedia/speedtest/nofile.php -O /dev/null</p>
            <p>That gives a slightly faster result</p>
            <p>Saving to: `/dev/null'</p>
            <p>[ &lt;=&gt; ] 134,219,776 69.0M/s in 1.9s</p>
            <p>2009-01-04 14:56:25 (69.0 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [134219776]</p>
            <p>This result seems a lot more realistic. Yet I am disapointed that it's not close to the 100 MB/s mark which his about the max that you can get with gigabit ether. Do I have so much of noise in my cable to wipe off about 30% of the bandwidth?</p>

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LAN Speed Test

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            <p>Wouldn't it be nice if the monthly archives could be displayed in the form for a chart? Unfortunately there isn't a plugin to do that. Well at least there wasn't one till now. I have just created a very basic plug-in it still needs a bit more work so I am not going to release it just yet. It's made entirely of CSS and javascript and I was inspired to build it after stumbling into this : <a href="http://applestooranges.com/blog/post/css-for-bar-graphs/?id=55">http://applestooranges.com/blog/post/css-for-bar-graphs/?id=55</a></p>

            <p>Right now though the plugin is added to my wordpress installation and it powers the newly created <a href="../archives">archives page</a>. I used to have an archives page earlier while with Movable Type (no there wasn't a chart on it). I couldn't find a way in Wordpress to create the exact same thing so it was not part of the blog till now.</p>

            <p>Having a full archives page means I can shorten the lengthy and ungainly list of monthly archives in the side bar. Some times with short posts the side bars is even 5 times longer in length than the content area (or it used to be that way till now)</p>

            <p>Update May 22, 2014: This site isn't powered by Wordpress now, but the plugin mentioned about vaporized long before that</p>



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Wordpress Chart Plugin

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            <p></p>
            <p>May your projects be completed on time and may they not suffer from scope creep. May the suits realize that you are a hell of a lot smarter than they are.</p>
            <p>I wish you all the best in trying to write bug free code and may your designs be elegant yet simple and may you remember to take backups on time.</p>
            <p>May your social networks grow and it is my wish that your twitter followers mushroom and that you catch all the blogshares idea drops.</p>
            <p>May your ISP be speedy and may your software updates be trouble free.</p>
            <p></p>

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