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2010 Feb 20 (Sat)

OpenOffice and corrupt file
Tonight I was continuing work on my BTSA documents and I panicked for a few minutes because when I tried to open one of my files and OpenOffice gave me an error:

The file 'file.odt' is corrupt and therefore cannot be opened. Should OpenOffice.org repair the file?

Naturally, I did want OO to repair the file, but that failed as well:

The file 'file.odt' could not be repaired and therefore cannot be opened.

So I google'd quickly to see if others had the same problem and found this page among others which goes through one way to solve it. But that seemed like quite a bit of work for just getting the text and no formatting. The BTSA documents are specially formatted, so it would really suck to have to replicate all the formatting again. On a hope, I thought I'd try AbiWord, and voila!, it worked. I tried to export a copy so that OO could open it, but OO croaked again. Anyway, I'll just be using AbiWord from now on, since I don't really use OpenOffice for anything else, really. Thank you, AbiWord developers! :-D

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2008 Jan 07 (Mon)

Using Git over EncFS and SSHFS
It was a little bit troublesome for me to get Git working on SSHFS mostly. I was getting errors from git such as "Failed to write" whenever I tried to push to the remote repository. Fortunately, after a bit of googling I found this e-mail, which reminded me I should read the man pages more often. Anyway, this is the sequence of commands I ended up with:
sshfs -o idmap=user -o uid=`id -u` -o gid=`id -g` -o workaround=rename REMOTE_USER@REMOTE_HOST:REMOTE_PATH LOCAL_PATH_RAW
encfs LOCAL_PATH_RAW LOCAL_PATH
cd LOCAL_PATH
git clone --bare --no-hardlinks ~/repo.git repo.git

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2007 Nov 06 (Tue)

Recovering /tmp file

Okay, so I did something very stupid and saved a file under /tmp, switched off my computer, and then booted it back up later to look for the file. (I blame lack of sleep.) Anyway, it was a simple text file that I didn't really want to write up again, so I decided to try to recover it. Since the file was on my laptop, and since Macs have a cool Firewire Target disk mode, I connected to my laptop from my Mini, and grepped the partition (it wasn't a really large file, but I hate having to retype something): grep -a -B100 -A100 'sentence that i remembered' /dev/partition > file.out While that ran, I just did my usual: read blogs, e-mail, and articles, and contacted some friends on the phone, etc. I came back every once in a while to see if file.out had any size. After about the fifth time checking, it grew to a whopping 40k! ;-) I then proceeded to use vim to extract the text I really needed, and I was done! Woo-hoo! This is something I can tell my students about who were asking what good the command line was. 'Course, they could retort and said I should have just saved my file somewhere else, but I think that's beside the point: the file was already lost, and I was trying to recover it. I'll see what they say Friday. :-)

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2007 May 14 (Mon)

Mutt Attachments

Today I updated my resume and sent it out to a prospective employer for part-time summer work. When I attached the pdf, I forgot to check the mime type, and the recipient said when they opened my resume, it was blank. After some quick googling, I found that mutt looks for a ~/.mime.types file (and afterwards $PREFIX/share/mutt/mime.types. Unfortunately, when I installed mutt, it didn't install the file into that location, and so the mime type wasn't correctly set. So I saved the mime.types from a clean, unzipped distribution of mutt as ~/.mime.types. Just frustrating that I didn't see an easy way to change the mime encoding for the attachment within mutt. All better now, though :-)

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2007 Mar 11 (Sun)

Dreamhost and SVN Perl bindings
Dreamhost already has Python bindings installed for SVN, but not the Perl ones. So it took some fitzing around to make git-svn work on my DH account. git-svn was giving an error that SSL wasn't supported, and after I tried installing subversion-1.4.3, it was saying that there was an SVN library mismatch. So, I just decided to installed the subversion version that was installed on the DH machine already (version 1.4.2).
The first thing I did was compile and install some dependencies: autoconf, curl, and libtool. I installed all of these under my home directory. After that, I downloaded neon-0.25.5, since that specific version is required by subversion. I compiled neon like so:

./configure --prefix=$HOME --with-ssl --with-libs=/usr --enable-shared

. After installing neon, I installed my own version of swig, configuring it with:

./configure --prefix=$HOME

. I then downloaded subversion-1.4.2 (to match the version installed on the dreamhost machine) and configured it with:

./configure --prefix=$HOME --with-swig=$HOME --with-neon=$HOME

. I edited the Makefile to change line 604 to read:

cd $(SWIG_PL_DIR)/native; $(PERL) Makefile.PL PREFIX=$(HOME) SITELIBEXP=$(HOME)/share/perl/5.8.4 SITEARCHEXP=$(HOME)/lib/perl5

. I had to make sure to add $HOME/lib/perl/5.8.4 to the $PERL5LIB, since SVN::Core was being installed there (and not in $HOME/lib/perl5).
I then ran make && make install && make swig-pl, and watched everything compile and install. When I ran make check-swig-pl, I got an error:

/tmp/subversion-1.4.2/subversion/libsvn_ra_dav/.libs/libsvn_ra_dav-1.so.0:
undefined symbol: SSL_load_error_strings at /usr/lib/perl/5.8/DynaLoader.pm
line 225.

. So I deleted

subversion/libsvn_ra_dav/.libs/libsvn_ra_dav-1.so.0

, ran make check-swig-pl again, and the tests passed. git-svn now works :-)

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2006 Aug 17 (Thu)

Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006
Going to see representative Ed Royce (R) tomorrow at the Orange Circle tomorrow morning (Deidrich Coffee), and want to get his opinion of the Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006, and hopefully give mine (time and context permitting). Go read it if you're interested in corporate influence on the internet's infrastructure.

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2006 Aug 10 (Thu)

A whole new world...on a Mac

In case you haven't been following news in the Mac world lately, there's a lot going on. Mac is now rolling out desktops and laptops with Intel Duo Core techonology: two processors on one die. The new laptop, MacBook Pro, looks sick and I'm resisting the temptation (for now) of buying one. Maybe even sell my MacMini to go all out and get one? Anyway, go over to apple.com and check out the keynote address at that Steve Jobs gave this last Tuesday. The hardware is not the only change either. Steve demo'ed the new capabilities of MacOS X Tiger 10.4.4 (the version releases are starting to look more like open source software: interesting), iLife, and iWork. Another company, named Google, finally released another killer app for the Mac: GoogleEarth for Mac! I've run a leaked beta two times, but now I'm glad the real deal is here. The gap between what's available for Windows that isn't available for OSX is becoming so small, while all the capabilities and applications you can do on OSX are (in my opinion) dominating over all you can do on Windows. If you ever want to switch, it's not too late ;)

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2006 Aug 06 (Sun)

"I've got my GMail"

In case you didn't sign into gmail yet, here's a lil' video that Google links to on the log-in page. I sorta dig it. :)

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2006 Jul 28 (Fri)

Net Neutrality
Some links: Link to www.youtube.com Link to www.publicknowledge.org Q-O-S Argument Link to www.njtelecomupdate.com

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2006 Jun 26 (Mon)

Chicago YAPC
i'm dumping my mind of at least some of what i'm experiencing at yapc chicago at my use.perl journal, in case anyone wants to follow along.

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