Life by Bits & Numbers

I’ve seen this video by Seth Godin, who is without any doubt a great thinker and visioner. This presentation by Seth, besides being very informational and interesting is quite extraordinary as well. I can not remember when I’ve seen a better presentation lately. Great usage of visuals and associations!

The presentation made me think about people that are successful and people who are not. And this is absolutely true – successful people ship. I’ve known this for all this time, but this simple 3 words “slogan” so to say never formulated in my head. Intuitively I always felt this but after this presentation it just formed.

Borrowing analogy from Math, shipping is a required condition but not satisfactory, meaning that just shipping you will not necessarily make successful, but if you DO NOT ship you will most definitely NOT be successful.

Again, very inspiring presentation that may be an eye opener for some. Enjoy!

I am using DokuWiki quite extensively lately to keep documentation of various things. Using wiki is quite useful in general and some people opt for using local wiki such as WikiPad but for my needs, I opted for online wiki since I often times need to access it from various places. Maybe in the future I will post why I chose DokuWiki and some of my (objective) thoughts about comparison to other wikis and some of my likes and hates about DokuWiki (although there are much more “likes” than “hates” ). This post would be short and not about it.

Several times I just wanted to put a plain (preformatted) text into the wiki for whatever reasons but I ran into a problem that DokuWiki isn’t really ready to support this. One option is to use <code> but then the lines are not word wrapped and for text it looks just weird. So at those various occasions I tried to search for a solution with little success until I just took xterm plugin and modified it slightly (mostly the style CSS file) which took me about 5 minutes to do  (and took me about 30 minutes to write this post, and the corresponding DokuWiki Plugin page and test the browsers) and now we have a wpre plugin for DokuWiki for word wrapped preformatted text which seem to work on all recent major browsers. You can dowload it from here wpre plugin for DokuWiki (the page on DokuWiki references this file)

Supported browsers:

(I just tested whatever I had installed on my machine and all are pretty recent. I suspect many much older versions should be supported as well)

• FireFox 3.5.7
• Safari 4.0.4 for Windows
• Opera 10.10
• Internet Explorer 8.0
• Chrome 4.0

Today many people that will open their gmail will be faced with the dialog about Google buzz. This is a new service from Google that in a sense makes your gmail inbox into twitter like account. But it is more than twitter like account. It includes conversations and embeddings from other sites like Picasa, Flickr, Youtube etc…

The interesting question marks that raised in my head are:

1. Is Google trying to compete with huge success of Twitter? (They are not trying to compete per se, they want the realtime information that’s available on Twitter and is not (yet???) available to Google.
2. Is this a step forward to Google Wave?

Maybe it’s actually both 1 and 2 and something else that we can not yet see in the big picture

Google Buzz is also available on Mobile:

And here’s the announcement of Google Buzz on the official Google blog

This is more of a personal notes for myself but I am sure others will find it useful.

Apache:

/usr/local/apache/logs/error_log

All exceptions caught by httpd, along with standard error output form CGI applications are logged here.  The first place you should look when httpd crashes, or you incur errors when accessing a website.

/usr/local/apache/logs/suexec_log

Contains auditing information reported by suexec each time a CGI applicaiton is executed.  If you receive an internal server error, with no relevant information being reported to the Apache error_log, check here for potential suexec policy violations.

Domain specific access logs are located here:

/usr/local/apache/domlogs/

PHP

To find out which php.ini is used for PHP configuration (to save you frustration of editing a non active php.ini) find it with the following simple command:
php -i | grep php.ini

where -i switch is used to give you PHP information (obviously). To see other useful switches run

php -h

to locate where php is use:

which php

(but you already knew this – right ?   )

*** Some of these tips are applicable not only to CentOS and cPanel configuration.

As I already wrote, BlackBerry development is not a lot of fun.  Not only you basically can not develop in Linux and OS X (although there are some workarounds, it makes the process even more painful than it already is). But you will also have problems with 64 bit operating systems. RIM is in a position that they do not officially support 64 bit systems.

The main problem with 64 bit Windows 7 for me was that I can not close the simulator (or actually the “fledge” application that runs the simulators). There are 2 possible solutions to this problem:

1. Kill the task through task manager
2. The simulator should close if you are in debug mode and you disconnect the debug session

There is also another inconvenience which is caused by your cautiously guarding Windows system. It will warn you every time that (Oh my!) fledge will change something on your computer. You know – the standard User Control Account message. To avoid that message always popping up, you will have to adjust your setting in User Control Account panel. Hit “Windows” then just type UCA, you will get it. Adjust it to the minimum and you’r good to go.

I just could NOT not to post it. I am trying to do a rationality in multi agent systems research nowadays. This speaks to me and these guys rock!

I hope the robots remember those us that helped make them what they are and keep us around to do all those jobs that they don’t want to do. Christopher Amato

It’s not a secret that Eclipse plugin is very buggy and although it has improved a lot over the time, the blackberry plugin still has a lot of issues and quirks. One of the problems that have been bugging me a lot was that sometimes the *.jdp file gets corrupted. This is the file where BB plugin for Eclipse saves most of the meta data for the project, including the files that are included in the project and consequently need to be compiled. So, many times I had problems with SVN meta data files corrupting this project, or sometimes perfectly legitimate *.java files that get stuck in the *.jdp file, but do not exist anymore. The result of the *.jdp file being corrupted is that your application does no longer get compiled and redeployed when you run it. And the worst part, Eclipse would not explicitly let you know about this. It would silently fail and not re-deploy the app. So unless this is the first time you run the application, or the changes you made are not visually obvious, you would not know about this. But this is completely separate issue. One of the many issues with BB Eclipse plugin already covered. Each time I have been struggling (sometimes for significant amount of times). Couple times I was able to manually delete files from the *.jdp file (although this is not recommended by RIM) and this solved the problem, but mostly I had to recreate the whole project from scratch, which if your project is large and, which is more important has dependencies on libraries, may become painful if you need to do this every few days.

So the easiest way I found so far to solve this problem is:

1. Delete the *.jdp file (you can just rename it to *.jdp.OLD)
2. Delete the project from Eclipse (right click the project and choose delete). DO NOT however check the checkbox “delete the contents of the project from disk”
3. Create a new project and point it to the same place.

Since all the Eclipse project related files remain untouched, you should get your project exactly at the same state it was before it got corrupted, minus the corrupted part. Why – because when you re-create the project Eclipse plugin should re-create the *.jdp file.

I wonder how many people have noticed the icon change for the new Firefox 3.5? It has been changed. The change is not very significant, but it was significant enough for me to take notice (with a significant delay though).

So here we go, old and new icons side by side:

The old and the new (respectively left to to right) side by side

The old and then the new one – larger versions

Find the differences

If you need to pop up a dialog or any screen actually from a process that runs in background on BlackBerry, it is fairly easy to do, unfortunately it is (as pretty much everything with BlackBerry development)  easy to figure out how to do.

The following piece of code should do the trick:

		synchronized (Application.getEventLock())
		{
			Ui.getUiEngine().pushGlobalScreen(new CLAScreen(), 1, UiEngine.GLOBAL_QUEUE);
		}

There are also a few things you should be aware of when using this code:

1. Your backgroud process should implement UiEngine. Easy way is to extend Application.
2. If you change UiEngine.GLOBAL_QUEUE to UiEngine.GLOBAL_MODAL, the dialog will block your thread until it is closed