So, found out while trying to VNC into my work box, that the “Visual Effects” in Ubuntu breaks the built-in GNOME VNC server – what happens is you can input text, click on controls, but changes are not refreshed into the view (the view isn’t “Damaged”). The current workaround seems to be either moving back to Metacity or some other WM, or turning off visual effects.

Side Note: Jolly’s Fast VNC is an AWESOME VNC client – as it suggests, fast, and with a really cool zoom mode for handling well larger screens over VNC, much recommended (after you fix the compositing )

Miss the little buggers (at grandma & grandpas) already…

A week or so ago, I got an email from a friend:

????????Just in case you haven’t noticed this yet, Google links to jay.shao.org now include warnings about malware: Jason E. Shao » Blog Archive » Sakai SVN Vendor Branch Outcome This site may harm your computer. Jul 17, 2007 … Soo… yesterday I completed my 2.3.1 Sakai vendor branch merge, … I had to use the trunk version of svn_load_dirs.pl and patch it — see Bug … jay.shao.org/archives/2007/07/17/sakai-svn-vendor-branch-outcome – Similar pages – Note this

The best kind of warnings are the ones you get about something you’re aware of, trying to fix, and hoping no one will notice. In this case, working through the baroque malware site removal process. How did I get dragged into it? Well…

I didn’t actually notice until I browsed to my blog using Firefox 3 (been my default browser for a while now — I really like Safari too, but Firefox 3 is not you’re daddy’s Mac Firefox) and got slammed with a really obnoxious error message noting that the site was suspected of malware. The page looks a lot like the kind you get nowadays when you visit a site with a self-signed certificate, except there was no way to dismiss it (but use Safari…). About the same time, I noticed that Google search results included the note referenced above. So, naturally I read in a bit to try and figure out how to get rid of it. Well…

1. Visit stopmalware.org
2. Read a pretty long written description
3. Find no way to identify what triggered the malware warning on my site
4. Submit a request to re-examine to try and get some contact.
5. twiddle…
6. Get a message back identifying a single problem with the site
7. Fix said problem (bad iFrame, possibly copy & pasted)
8. Submit a 2nd request to re-examine
9. twiddle…
10. Get another message back identifying a different, specific problem (not mentioned the first time)
11. Fix said problem
12. Submit a 3rd request to re-examine
13. twiddle…
14. exoneration (no notification though) all is well with the web

So, aside from my personal irritation at this process I thought I’d add some mentions based upon some customer service observations:

• not being able to find out what you did wrong is really irritating
• not being able to find out all the things you did wrong makes it worse
• internet accessing processes that require real-people time makes them feel really frustrating

Blog and it shall be done! Colloquy just released an update which lists the blank chat room problem (source of amusement like “hello…?”. This makes me happy since aside from that small incapacitating bug, I’ve been extremely happy with Colloquy — it makes IRC feel like not IRC

Release Notes

Colloquy 2.1 (3720) The latest build on 9/11/2007 can be downloaded here (6.61 MB). Requires 10.3.9 or higher. Supplied as a universal binary, allowing it to run on an Intel or PowerPC Mac. Changes in this Release * Fix for the blank chat room bug. #576

Update: Hmmm… not entirely fixed — though happens much less now. Looks like /reload styles is still going to be my friend for a while. Apparently this fixes a case where with Safari 3 it happened a lot more.

I’ve been using Colloquy as an IRC client — for the most part it’s just beautiful and very Mac like. There is however one annoying recurring bug…

“Blank Chat Room Bug” [#576] Blank chat room bug Sometimes, in random intervals, some auto-joined chat rooms appear as blank / empty / not active / plain white (or whatever background color your style uses), although activity can be observed through the unread messages counter or Growl notifications. Workaround: As a workaround you can type /reload style in the affected chat rooms.

What this means is that sometimes, randomly all the text in the room disappears — this has lead to some funny “helloo…” moments on ##uportal. Hopefully posting this tip here saves someone some grief.

So I finished merging in the Samigo 2.4 changes to the Rutgers code base yesterday the instructions in the wiki were actually very good — one small mis-merge on my part, but aside from the self-imposed pain the merge went quite smoothly.

So far, the defaulting to off of the rich text areas is a huge improvement in useability (though, really it would be nice if sakai had a nice “minimal” mode or something) though I wonder if it should be labeled “show toolbar” and hide the switching editor modes from the user?

The “retract now” button is also a nice touch.

At some point, organizing the list of posted tests, and finding someway to hide, move tests that were retracted without anyone taking them would probably be a big plus.

Much of August is likely to be spent load-testing (and creating infrastructure to load-test) to validate performance of the upgrade in the Rutgers environment, but the results from Michigan/Stanford’s testing look very promising, and we are planning on being on Samigo 2.4 for the Fall semester.

bolster the possibility of using something like the wiki or other tools as I would expect they could be used. bolster the possibility of using something like the wiki or other tools as I would expect they could be used.

Soo… yesterday I completed my 2.3.1 Sakai vendor branch merge, and it’s now up on a Rutgers test server. It’s been sanity tested, and is ready for further banging. Speaking of banging… it did take quite a few steps to get to this stage…

Note: 2.3.1 is a small merge, I think it was only about 15-20 affected files. Having said that, it took almost 3-days to get this working right, and do the merge using SVN’s tools, both because of my relative inexperience with SVN and the way Rutgers initially setup our repository. Having said that, I do believe that going through this pain will make the next larger merge (2.4? 2.5?) easier, as well as being good experience to ease migrating to Samigo, Melete, and JForum 2.4.

Notes

• I used Glenn’s .subversion/config for things like auto-props and eol conventions. SVN sets a lot of commit preferences on the client side, so I’ll commit this as well, and we should try to sync up on a common configuration
• Keyword substitution had to be turned on in our repository (svn:keywords) in order to get svn diff and svn merge to work as promised and omit spurious conflicts caused by keyword substitutions — this especially hurts if your files use the $URL$ keyword and come off of a SVN tag…
• I had to do a clean import of 2.3.0 into our vendor tree in order to get clean diffs when I pulled in 2.3.1, since keywords had to be substituted for both imports
• I had to use the trunk version of svn_load_dirs.pl and patch it — see Bug 2789 — to get the vendor branch to work
• /sakai/trunk in our SVN has been updated to point to the new code, through externals mappings, though given my experience with SVN merging we will likely move to a fully realized trunk in the not too distant future.
• /vendor/sakai/current is an exact replica of 2.3.1 minus 5 files that SVN would not import correctly (1 croation js calendar localization and 4 docbook XML files)
• Then I ended up merging changes from 2.3.0 -> 2.3.1 module by module into our local Sakai repository

That was it!

Downloading uP3 quickstart was easy enough. Faizan exported RC1 from SVN and imported it into our CVS repository. build.properties seems not to have made it — maybe some kind of .cvsignore filter he had on Eclipse when he did the initial checkin.

Tried hooking up to Oracle, ran into problems… Spent 30 min or so until I figured out that DBLoader probably has some more string sniffing for particular DB configs — it does. /portal/properties/db/dbLoaderContext.xml

Especially seems to be a problem with Oracle cause of all the ways their dbVersion string very — not sure if Oracle does that for products, or if it’s convention for DBAs.

Eric was saying most of uP3 dev has been against HSQL, so there could be Oracle bugs. Spent like 2 hours overall looking at the DB reconfig – got the version string matched correctly, and the app starts up, but going to the uP3 rendering context still produces errors when trying to load up the ‘renderingAttributeProviders’ beans. Going to look at it with Eric tomorrow.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2006/11/open-source-java

It has finally happened. Sun today announced that Java SE, Java ME, and Glassfish are being open sourced under the GNU General Public License v2 (GPLv2) with Sun today releasing an early build of the Java SE 7 HotSpot JVM, the javac compiler, and JavaHelp in the new OpenJDK project at Java.NET which will be the project site for future JDK development, releases, bug fixes, etc.  The fully buildable Java SE 7 JDK classlibraries will be available in Q1 2007.

GPL seems like a good choice if you’re going after bundling on Linux.  I can’t help but think that Apache would have been a better alignment though – I think Sun still seems very focused on the desktop and beating out Microsoft.  This seems to be positioning Java to compete more heads on with Mono which Novell has been pushing and which seems to be gaining traction in the GNOME crowd.

Seems like partnering with the ASF would have been the best way to build a strong community around Java though…

Thirty Years With Computers (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

bq.. We’ll also spend a big percentage of the computer power on defense mechanisms such as self-healing software (to root out bugs and adapt to changing environments) and aggressively defensive virus antibodies. We’ll need such software to protect against “social engineering” attacks, such as email that purports to come from your boss and asks you to open an attachment.

Computer games in 2034 are likely to offer simulated worlds and interactive storytelling that’s more engaging than linear presentations such as those in most movies today. For this new entertainment, the simplest accomplishment we need is artificial actors rendered in real time in high-definition animation. Adapting stories to individual users will be much harder. Once solved, the resulting user interfaces will be much more appealing to a broad market than current computer games, which typically feature convoluted gameplay and simplified worlds.

p. I think Nielson’s right about one thing in particular. Much of that increase in computing power will be eaten up to produce better developer tools. Perhaps at that point logical languages like Prolog, or other higher level abstractions will become more popular.

Predictions of amazing breakthroughs in the future are something I always find somewhat amusing. People talk about faster computers enabling voice recognition. AI, etc. I think the real question is when will programming languages & tools advance enough to enable advanced services? Continue Reading »