Unix / Comp Languages

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Notepad++ load langs.xml failed

April 9, 2010 in Open Source, Unix / Comp Languages by Ezra S F | No comments

Notepad++ is my Windows text editor. Work has a site license for UltraEdit. I bought a personal license for EditPlus back in 2002-ish. Notepad++ does what I need it to do without having to track down a license key.

This week I started getting this error when it starts.

Load langs.xml failed!

Apparently this happens enough, Google was able to suggest the search and pulled up a solution in the first result. Rob3C at Superuser.com recommends renaming the langs.xml out of the way and copying the langs.model.xml into place. It was thoughtful of the developers to provide a default good version on which to fall back.

I was curious what was wrong with the the file. Turns out it just ended in the middle of line 100 which is ini, a style I would not have modified. (I mainly use SQL and bash.) Also, the bad one uses the wrong end style for the language element despite it being correctly on adjacent lines. So the file is no longer valid XML. Very odd.


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Selected Quotes About Computers & Software – The Core Memory

March 25, 2010 in Geek / Nerd / Dork, Hardware, Quotes, Unix / Comp Languages by Ezra S F | 3 comments

10 Types of People Ran across Selected Quotes About Computers & Software at a site called The Core Memory. I have the teeshirt for this first one. The rest are for inpiration.

There are 10 types of people. Those that understand binary and those that do not.

– Ray Roton

Old programmers never die… They just decompile.

– Peter Dick

I haven’t lost my mind, I have it backed up on tape somewhere.

– Unknown

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

– Donald Knuth

Beware of programmers who carry screw drivers.

– Leonard Brandwein

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

– Rich Cook

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

– Pablo Picasso

If it’s there and you can see it – it’s real.
If it’s not there and you can see it – it’s virtual.
If it’s there and you can’t see it – it’s transparent.
If it’s not there and you can’t see it – you erased it!

– Scott Hammer

I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC;
It plainly marks four my revue
Mistakes I cannot sea.
I’ve run this poem threw it,
I’m sure your pleased too no,
Its letter perfect in it’s weigh,
My checker tolled me sew.

– Janet Minor

Programming is like sex, one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.

– Michael Sinz

Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.

– Unknown

I’d love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code!

– Unknown

If a train station is where a train stops, what’s a workstation?

– Unknown

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

– Maurice Wilkes

They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction.

– Janet Reno

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

– Joseph Campbell

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.

– Nathanie Borenstein

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

– Sidney J. Harris

Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft … and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.

– Wernher von Braun

Man is a slow, sloppy and brilliant thinker; the machine is fast, accurate and stupid.

– William M. Kelly


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Google Chrome on Linux

December 9, 2009 in Browsers, Unix / Comp Languages by Ezra S F | No comments

I was excited to read today a Google Chrome Beta is now available on Linux. Gmail and Google Reader have weird font issues for me on both Linux and Window Firefox. So I tend split my browser load based on where the sites work best for me.

Making the Linux switch meant leaving Chrome behind unless I went for the unstable version. I was willing to wait for a beta. I just expected to wait a few more months. Whew.

So far so good!


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Linux Adventure Part 3 [SOLVED]

December 3, 2009 in Unix / Comp Languages by Ezra S F | No comments

Linux Adventure Part 1 | Linux Adventure Part 2 \ Use these to catch up on the story.

After work and much ridicule from a coworker over this Ubuntu mess, I come home to play some more on this wireless mess. I was even somewhat leaning towards giving the firmware cutter stuff a try. After all, it is just a card, right? I could get another miniPCI card in a pinch, right?

I looked at dmesg and syslog but there were few mentions of the card. So back to research… Lo, the BCM4312 I thought was supported was actually 14e4:4312 when what I have is a 14e4:4315 which is “in progress”. WTF does that mean? Without a date on the page, how do I know how long ago that was?

Now, purely farting around I clicked the Network Tools to turn off the wired connection only to see a list of wireless networks. It was easy to setup the network and get online.

Huh.

Yeah, computers hate me.


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Linux Adventure Part 2

December 2, 2009 in Hardware, Unix / Comp Languages by Ezra S F | 1 comment

Linux Adventure Part 1 | Linux Adventure Part 3 [SOLVED]

So far into the story, I tried repairing Windows Vista which failed to actually give me a working entry into the operating system. The Linux Live CDs were non-committed forays into Knoppix, CentOS, and Ubuntu. All failed to turn on the wireless. An ethernet cord would have gotten me online.

So I was stuck with pretty much a brick.

My next step was to venture out to the store and buy a hard drive. The Ubuntu CD included an installer, so I used it to install a local copy. Continued research revealed my problem probably was the fact my computer came with a Broadcom 4312 card. (My brother said my problem was trying use wireless with Linux.)

Without an ethernet connection, I ended up installing Linux STA drivers from source by downloading them and transferring them by FTP.  No good. Multiple times. I never got it to recognize them. Other options called for installing a firmware update on the wireless card. The idea of a firmware update to the wireless card making me stuck on Linux worries me.

Thankfully I got home to where I have ethernet cords. By this point, I had so completely hosed things, so I reinstalled Ubuntu to start over fresh. Now seeing the Internet through the LAN, Ubuntu offered me “restricted” hardware drivers. The b43 set didn’t do anything. The STA set did enable the Wireless option. Even dhclient referenced eth2! However, the wifi status light doesn’t turn on when I enable wireless. Ugh. So the drivers work better but not enough to get it working.

Also, (based on the time stamp of the file I was able to find in a backup of the problem laptop) I haven’t connected a computer to my home network since February, so I didn’t remember what was the password for the network. Finding which computer or external drive contained the information took a few hours. Yay for backups.

Linux Adventure Part 1 | Linux Adventure Part 3 [SOLVED]


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Linux Adventure Part 1

December 1, 2009 in Unix / Comp Languages by Ezra S F | 1 comment

For about a week now I’ve been without my personal laptop as anything much more than a brick. I think tonight I am going to copy off the pictures and other important information to my desktop. From there, anything I do to make the situation worse will no longer matter as much.

Monday night, I shutdown the laptop. Microsoft Vista Automatic Updates said it was working on some updates post-logout. Rather than babysit, I went to bed. I should have babysat it.
:(

The next morning, Tuesday, starting the computer told me I had a corrupted or missing \boot\BCD. The Boot Configuration Data file is pretty important, as without one the Windows operating system doesn’t even give me a command prompt. After some research I found out I needed my Windows installation DVD only 250 miles away. This caused me so much distress I even forgot I had a spare computer with me.

So I decided to download a Linux Live CD and use that while stuck away from home. At least I would be able to research the problem and possibly fix it later. The first Live CD I tried was a downloaded iso flavor called Knoppix, I remembered from many years ago. Ick. Knoppix Adriane is intended for the visually impaired slipped by me, so the computer reading everything got annoying extremely quickly. Finally turned off the reading stuff, but I had a new problem. Wireless wasn’t working.

Macintosh LC III … And I was out of CD-Rs.

So a newer memory was a few years ago, a friend with a barely functioning Macintosh LC III (pictured right) wanted to get her stuff off it. She brought it up again a few times since, the most recent occasion to ask me to explain why her Windows computer cannot just read 3.5″ floppies from the Mac without any computer-ese. A coworker mentioned a Live CD of CentOS could mount the drive and transfer the data.

So, I downloaded an iso of the CentOS Live CD while I went to the store to get some disks to burn. While starting up CentOS, I downloaded Ubuntu just in case this second Live CD failed. It was a good thing because the CentOS Live CD was prettier without any improvement in getting on the wireless.

Nor was the Ubuntu Live CD any better.

By this point, I had found a site offering a torrent to a Vista Recovery CD. The quandary was to go back to Windows or stick with Linux. The recovery CD off a random web site could just not work or at worst infect the non-functioning computer. So I installed BitTorrent and downloaded the recovery CD. I tried the Startup Repair, System Restore, and Command Prompt (to manually rebuild the booter). Since this failed, I decided Windows Vista was dead.

So I started looking into how to make Ubuntu work for me.

Linux Adventure Part 2 | Linux Adventure Part 3 [SOLVED]


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Diff and Spaces

June 19, 2009 in Blackboard Vista, Unix / Comp Languages by Ezra S F | 2 comments

Amy’s dump of the CE/Vista settings table ended up with a slightly different format than mine. I was able to use sed to rejoin the correct lines. This resulted in two files with spaces on about half of the lines in the file. Ouch.

Thankfully diff has a -b flag to ignore the spaces. Really useful in this case.

Now… To figure out why a pattern I copy and paste from a file is not found with grep.
:)


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Better CE/Vista Web Server Log

February 26, 2009 in Blackboard Vista, Unix / Comp Languages by Ezra F | 1 comment

Some support tickets are more easily solved by knowing both user behavior and environment. An often helpful piece of information is what web browser they used. To add this, shut down the cluster, edit /VISTA_HOME/config/config.xml with to include the cs(User-Agent), and start the cluster. This line will need to appear for every node. At startup, the nodes will download a new copy of the file.

<elf-fields>date time time-taken c-ip x-weblogic.servlet.logging.ELFWebCTSession sc-status cs-method cs-uri-stem cs-uri-query bytes cs(User-Agent) x-weblogic.servlet.logging.ELFWebCTExtras</elf-fields>

Command:
cp config.xml config.xml.bak
sed -s s/bytes x-/bytes cs(User-Agent) x-/g config.xml.bak > config.xml

Probably this could be edited in the Weblogic 9.2 console. I haven’t looked yet.


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IMS Import Error When Node Is Down

July 28, 2008 in Blackboard Vista, Unix / Comp Languages, Work by Big Eazy | No comments

This is what I got when a node was down while I attempted to do an IMS import in Blackboard CE/Vista.

Failed to upload files, exiting.
Cause could include invalid permission on file/directory,
invalid file/directory or
repository related problems

The keywords permission, file, and directory in this would have sent me anywhere but to the right place. The keyword repository made me suspicious the node had a worse issue than just bad permissions. So I looked for the most recent WebCTServer log and found it to be a week old. Verifying the last messages in the log confirmed it had been down for a week.
:(

To see anything in the log questioning whether or not the node was running would have saved me lots of time this morning.

Added to my .bashrc a couple lines to provide a visual indicator how many are running.

JAVA_RUNNING=`ps -ef | grep [j]ava | grep -c [v]ista`
echo “  — No. Vista processess running = $JAVA_RUNNING”

Better might even be to have it evaluate whether less than one or more than two (or three) are running. If so, then put something obvious the world is falling. Maybe later. Took me just a couple minutes to write and test what I have. The rest will come after I decide what I really want. :)

Also, it wasn’t running because a coworker had run into a situation where the fifth node would not start. She thought maybe it was because the number of connection Oracle would accept was not high enough. I suggested a simple test would be to shut down a node and see if the problem one suddenly works. I happened to be working with the one she shut down for the test. It happens she had just started a script to bring them up when I asked.


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We Need a 4th Vista DBA / Technical Support

July 23, 2008 in Database / Oracle, Unix / Comp Languages, Work by Ezra S F | No comments

Work for OIIT!

Become our 4th DBA / technical support person for our team.

  • Located in Athens, GA (college town, UGA football)
  • $, benefits, generous leave, rare snow
  • we love open source
PDF of GeorgiaVIEW DBA position

Check out the PDF (right) for more information.

Sorry for the convoluted route to the application…

  • Click this link to go to our HR site.
  • Click the “View Job Postings / Apply for Job” link.
  • Check the “Information Instructional Tech” box.
  • Enter “learning” for the keyword and click search.
  • “Systems Support Specialist 3” is our DBA position. We also have a Business Systems Analyst position for a less technical position.

We’d love to have you.


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