Monthly hackathon or unconference in Mpls or St. Paul

I want to hear from people who are interested in doing the City Camp MN and Open Twin Cities idea more often primarily in a hackathon format.

Doesn't have to be amazing or awesome every month, just a group of creative and interested and civic minded people getting together once per month or so.

I can help to organize and find space for this.

Especially interested in having non-coders attend, developers aren't the best with idea creation and collaboration between non-technical and techies is always the best.

I know there are people looking for projects to code on, and I know there are people looking for help moving their ideas forward.

Post in the comments if you are interested in this and I will contact you or post on this blog as this moves forward.

#hackmonthlymn

My favorite XML editor and viewer for linux

mlview

http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/mlview


I always forget this because I don't use it enough. It's pretty fast, but can be a little slow on very large documents.

Increase memory size for SQLDeveloper

For some reason, they make it very difficult to increase the memory size of SQLDeveloper, you can't even pass in the options on the command line.

I'm not sure about Mac or Windows, but on Linux, it's pretty easy, just edit your ide/bin/ide.conf file and change the lines "AddVMOption -Xmx640M" and "AddVMOption -Xms128M" lines to something larger (or smaller). You can see what I have mine set to below.

Here is mine after I changed it:

tor@XXX:~/sqldeveloper$ pwd
/home/tor/sqldeveloper
tor@XXX:~/sqldeveloper$ cat ./ide/bin/ide.conf
#-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# Oracle IDE Configuration File
# Copyright 2000-2008 Oracle Corporation.
# All Rights Reserved.
#
#-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
IncludeConfFile ../../ide/bin/jdk.conf
AddJavaLibFile ../../ide/lib/ide-boot.jar
SetMainClass oracle.ide.boot.Launcher
#
# If you are getting the 'Low Memory Warning' Message Dialog while running
# JDeveloper, please increase the -Xmx value below from the default 768M to
# something greater, like 1024M or 1250M. If after increasing the value,
# JDeveloper is no longer starting up because it fails to create a virtual
# machine, then please reduce the modified -Xmx value.
#
AddVMOption -Xmx2048M
AddVMOption -Xms512M
#
# Turn off verifications since the included classes are already verified
# by the compiler. This will reduce startup time significantly. On
# some Linux Systems, using -Xverify:none will cause a SIGABRT, if you
# get this, try removing this option.
#
AddVMOption -Xverify:none
#
# On some Windows Terminal Server installations, relocation errors of
# system DLLs can sometimes occur when using OJVM. Use this option to
# specify a heap base address for OJVM to resolve this problem. This
# option only works with OJVM and cannot be used with any HotSpot JVM.
#
# AddVMOption -Xheapbase100000000

Time Machine on Mac OS 10.6.8 failing backing up to an Ubuntu netatalk server with "(Error) IndexSDB in si_writeBackDBO:Error 2 storing dbo"

I ran into some problems about four months ago with being able to back up my 10.6 Mac to an Ubuntu netatalk server. I just started failing, with a generic error message on the UI. All other netatalk services and shares were working fine.

It was getting to the point where it looked like it was working, but once it actually began backing up, it would get to about 100kb, and then fail with this message in the system log on the Mac:

Oct 29 16:37:48 my-macbook mds[38]:
(/Volumes/Backup of MyMac/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX)
(Error) IndexSDB in si_writeBackDBO:Error 2 storing dbo(9770a3,430,182,4b076d10a69e9,0,1d1686,0)

I was able to follow the instructions copied below from a comment on this page:

10.6: Set up Time Machine on networked AFP volume

Obviously I didn't follow them exactly, since I have an Ubuntu server and not a Mac OSX server, but it now turns out that my Mac now creates the sparsebundle file for me! I basically deleted the whole folder (sparsebundle that I had created for the previous version of Mac OS) that I was using for the netatalk share, created an empty one with 777 perms, added the .com.apple.timemachine.supported file, and my Mac did the rest!

Note: The backup did fail once or twice after following these instructions, the third time it started working all by itself, all I did was retry.

10.6: Set up Time Machine on networked AFP volume
Authored by: Henk Poley on Feb 27, '11 01:52:53AM

Maybe I'm doing something wrong.. but the only thing I have to do is:

1. Create an AFP share on an OS X machine (set permissions, user accounts & passwords as you like)
2. Run `touch .com.apple.timemachine.supported` from Terminal.app on that share
3. Mount the AFP share by clicking around in Finder
4. Point Time Machine to the disk

It then goes off to create a .sparsebundle, mounts that and does a backup.

I may have run the magic `defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1` way back when, so you may have to run that too.

Both machines run 10.6.6, but I (maybe miss-)remember doing it like that on Leopard too.

(Before anyone says this doesn't work anymore, I'm doing an initial backup using that method right now)

Edited on Feb 27, '11 01:59:53AM by Henk Poley

SQuirreL and Oracle ORA-01867

Global Preference (v3.1)

I have had a specific error plaguing me for some time now, when using the SQuirreL SQL client to access an Oracle Scheme with a database link to another Scheme.  The query might look something like this:

SELECT * FROM SOMETABLE@OTHERSCHEME

I would consistently get an ORA-01867 error. Every forum I searched seemed to point back to DATE or TIMESTAMP handling. Playing with the Global Preferences, I found that the DATE handling option titled Interpret DATE columns as TIMESTAMP must be un-selected. -- Chad

How to set chrome as your default browser for Thunderbird on Ubuntu

From this bug report:

it appears that in Thunderbird 3 the protocol handlers are ignored in favor of the
settings in the "Attachment" preferences. Indeed, once I set the http and https
"content types" to xdg-open, Thunderbird correctly opened http and https links in
Chrome.

Export from iMovie to play on Blackberry Bold 9700

Want to export a video from iMovie to play on your Blackberry Bold 9700? Tired of showing your videos on the youtube player? No problem!

For the impatient: use MPEG4, 25fps, auto key frames and restrict to 1248 kbits/sec at 480x270 letterbox. Audio is AAC codec, Mono, 44.1, and a target bitrate of 64k.

A 3:30 video renders to about 33MB.

First choose 'Export using Quicktime' from the menu



Then you will see a dialog like this. Choose options



After that you should see the setting for the video formatting and audio. Choose the top 'Settings' button.



Now you will get a dialog for the video format. Use MPEG4, 25fps, auto key frames and restrict to 1248 kbits/sec. Now close this dialog, and hit the 'size' button.



Choose a custom size, and enter 480x270, preserve aspect using letterbox, and deinterlace. Close this dialog, and choose the sound settings button.



Use an AAC codec, Mono, 44.1, and a target bitrate of 64k. Close this dialog.



Now give your video a name, and hit save

Squirrel not starting fix

If OOM kills squirrel hard, and squirrel will not restart giving a Null Pointer error, you can follow this thread below by removing the SQLAliases23_treeStructure.xml file from your $HOME/.squirrel dir. It is a transient file.

Stack trace:

tor@unwise:~/SQuirreL SQL Client$ ./squirrel-sql.sh
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
    at java.awt.EventQueue.invokeAndWait(EventQueue.java:997)
    at javax.swing.SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait(SwingUtilities.java:1323)
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.fw.gui.GUIUtils.processOnSwingEventThread(GUIUtils.java:350)
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.client.gui.WindowManager.(WindowManager.java:161)
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.client.Application.executeStartupTasks(Application.java:753)
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.client.Application.startup(Application.java:246)
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.client.Main.main(Main.java:60)
Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: java.lang.NullPointerException
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.client.gui.db.JTreeAliasesListImpl.initTree(JTreeAliasesListImpl.java:233)
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.client.gui.db.JTreeAliasesListImpl.(JTreeAliasesListImpl.java:101)
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.client.gui.db.AliasesList.(AliasesList.java:44)
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.client.gui.WindowManager.createAliasesListUI(WindowManager.java:877)
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.client.gui.WindowManager.initialize(WindowManager.java:861)
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.client.gui.WindowManager.access$200(WindowManager.java:77)
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.client.gui.WindowManager$1.run(WindowManager.java:165)
    at java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(InvocationEvent.java:199)
    at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:597)
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.client.Application$1.dispatchEvent(Application.java:195)
    at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForFilters(EventDispatchThread.java:269)
    at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForFilter(EventDispatchThread.java:184)
    at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:174)
    at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:169)
    at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:161)
    at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(EventDispatchThread.java:122)
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.client.gui.db.AliasFolderState.applyExpansionAndSelectionToNode(AliasFolderState.java:144)
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.client.gui.db.AliasFolderState.applyExpansionAndSelection(AliasFolderState.java:160)
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.client.gui.db.JTreeAliasesListImpl.applyAliasFolderState(JTreeAliasesListImpl.java:264)
    at net.sourceforge.squirrel_sql.client.gui.db.JTreeAliasesListImpl.initTree(JTreeAliasesListImpl.java:220)
    ... 15 more

Test ldap connection against Active Directory

How to test a connection to AD using linux ldapsearch


ldapsearch -LLL -x -H 'ldap://server.com:389' -b 'DC=domain,DC=office,DC=com' -D 'CN=openfire,OU=Service Accounts,OU=User Accounts,OU=DOMAIN,DC=domain,DC=office,DC=com' -W '(sAMAccountName=tor)'


This will make sure that your user can bind, and the in the search they can see user accounts.

We used this for ldap integration for authentication for JIRA and openfire.

Locking the keyboard on a Blackberry Bold

Because I never read the manual, I was having problems locking the keyboard on my new Blackberry Bold. First, you have to turn off the language switching in the menu to be able to use the old 'Alt-Enter' shortcut for locking the keyboard.

Thing is, with the new trackball, that key combination is a little awkward, and I am so paranoid about dropping the dang thing, that I have been using the menu option for locking.

Until now.

Jeez, the manual for this thing is literally hundreds of pages, and to be honest, I've never even looked at it. I mean, seriously, why wouldn't I already know everything about using a Blackberry?

So, two key shortcuts I learned today are;

hold down '*', this will lock the keyboard
hold down '#', this will toggle between vibrate and normal profiles

Sweet.