Java Thinking

I've been using Remote Desktop Viewer to administer and set up my parents computer (running Ubuntu 9.10) in another country. Although functional - it's exactly what I want - I've had lots of trouble with usability, most likely attributed to the bandwidth between the 2 locations. The main issue is responsiveness – the mouse movement is terrible, almost unusable, taking ages to accurately position the mouse where you want. I couldn't find much in the way of settings to play with when using the Remote Desktop Viewer that comes installed by default with Ubuntu. But when I installed Remmina Remote Desktop Client , I noticed that there were options for Colour Depth and Quality. Changing the colours to 256 and using poorest quality, I can now control the remote desktop much better. Now it is usable and much less frustrating! I've been working with Netbeans Platform 6.8 , making a desktop GUI for an application I've been working on. I got off to a slow start, but after ...

So I recently submitted a patch to the NetworkManager component: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=607731  - but it turns out to be a duplicate because this problem was addressed in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600779 - by default Bugzilla doesn't seem to include 'resolved' defects in the search results. You have to go to advanced search and select all statuses . So, if my patch wasn't needed, and this issue has been resolved, then why doesn't the source code in trunk have this change? Bug 600779 mentions that service providers is deprecated, but by what? Ubuntu 9.10 still uses it, because when I edited /usr/share/mobile-broadband-provider-info/serviceproviders.xml it worked fine for me. If service providers is deprecated, then why isn't there something on the homepage? Bugzilla doesn't seem to report which source files were changed in a bug - something I quite like in JIRA. See comment #1 : VirginInternet would still be used for teth...

Its been a good week. I got my Virgin Mobile Broadband Prepaid 3G modem working, and learnt a lot in the process, and actually contributed to the GNOME project: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=607731 As part of this, I installed Pidgin so I could join the IRC channel and talk to developers, but I haven't yet figured out how to view the history for a channel - so I can see what happened while I was offline... It does surprise me though, that the database for mobile broadband providers is specific to the window manager (GNOME) instead of being a system level thing. I'm sure there are good reasons, and it probably doesn't matter, but what do the KDE (and others) users do? Define it all over again? Worse than that though is that Virgin don't seem to make the APN easily available. I found it by searching the web, and finding it in forums, but why isn't it in the FAQ on a Virgin site? I didn't anticipate how much I'd enjoy having access to the internet...

I recently bought a Virgin Mobile Broadband (Australia) PrePaid USB modem - a Huawei e160e. I activated it over the phone, and when I plugged it in to my Dell Inspiron 1525 running Ubuntu 9.10, I could see that it was connected to the network (this modem flashes a blue light every 3 seconds when connected to the mobile network). But, try as I might, I couldn't get it connected. Every time I tried, it would just disconnect. Looking in the system logs, I'd see: Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: Plugin /usr/lib/pppd/2.4.4/nm-pppd-plugin.so loaded. Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: pppd 2.4.5 started by root, uid 0 Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: Using interface ppp0 Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyUSB0 Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: CHAP authentication succeeded Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: CHAP authentication succeeded Jan  6 12:43:06 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: Modem ...

It started off simple enough: "Can you install Photoshop Elements please?" - A friend got Photoshop Elements for xmas, since it was plugged as an easy, effective way to manage and share photos. (Toshiba laptop, running Vista) Installing it was easy enough, but when coming to share photos via email it got a bit scary because, he uses Yahoo mail, not a fat email client. When I started looking at it I though okay, I just need to set up Outlook with the mail server settings. Going into the help menu in Yahoo mail gave some pretty clear instructions on how to set Outlook up - but it didn't work. It kept asking for the username and password, which never worked. Searching around the web showed people talking about POP access to Yahoo mail, some suggesting it was a paid feature. But the Yahoo documentation didn't make any mention of needing a paid account. After wasting too much time on this, I just set up gmail - I knew I could easily access POP and SMTP here. So after c...

I'm working on a little sample framework - really only to keep my sanity and practice my chosen craft - that allows you to string together tasks in a pipeline for processing. To exercise that framework - to flush out the pros and cons of the implementation - I'm writing a sample application. The basic idea is that each task is interested in an event. That event could be the arrival of a file, or the completion of another task etc. To string tasks together, I've created a simple database queue system - as a task completes, it writes to the queue and then other tasks which are interested will see that event and then begin. Tasks complete either successfully (by returning no errors) or unsuccessfully (by returning more than one error). An important concept is to be able to add (or remove) tasks from the pipeline programmatically and without changing the database schema. So, quite simply, when a task completes, that event is written to the queue - but how do we find which event...

I've just now stumbled across Rapache , a useful GUI tool that makes configuring apache easy. I found it by accident in the Ubuntu Software Center, but unfortunately it would freeze while trying to add a new domain. I searched the web for answers, and found a bug report . This didn't specifically reference Ubuntu 9.10 (rather, 9.04) and the file that needed to be patched didn't exist in the given location. I found it easily enough: paul@paul-laptop:~$ sudo find / -name RapacheGui.py[sudo] password for paul: /usr/lib/pymodules/python2.5/RapacheGtk/RapacheGui.py /usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/RapacheGtk/RapacheGui.py /usr/share/pyshared/RapacheGtk/RapacheGui.py paul@paul-laptop:~$ I edited the last one (/usr/share/pyshared/RapacheGtk/RapacheGui.py) as documented in comment 23 to add the following at line 79: if not Shell.command.ask_password(): sys.exit(1) Note, this line MUST be preceeded by 8 spaces - indentation is important in Python. Now, rapache would prompt for ...