Eclipse button problem with Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

I ran into this issue while installing the Google App Engine... a quick description of the problem is that some buttons in Eclipse were not responding (doing nothing) after I upgraded to Karmic Koala, after checking the log file, network connection settings and some other things that didn't work I decided to ask the oracle (Google) about it and after a while I found a simple and quick solution here.

Just create an executable file with the following content:

 #!/bin/sh  
 export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1  
 /opt/eclipse-3.5/eclipse  

Now back to coding ;)

Eclipse Galielo and Google App Engine Plugin

I just installed Galileo and I went straight to the update site to install Google App Engine plugin but for some reason after adding the site (http://dl.google.com/eclipse/plugin/3.5) and following the instructions, Galileo simply didn't do ANYTHING after I clicked on the "Next" button, anyway I found the zip files here and it is just as simple as any other plugin.




1. Download the zip file here for you version.
2. Unzip it at the "dropins" folder in your Eclipse (Galileo) directory.
3. Restart Eclipse

That's it ;)

Windows Task Manager through command prompt

Today I was playing my CSI role as a software developer, also known as: fixing a possible bug, that ended up being a configuration problem. It took a couple of remote desktop sessions to reach the the right environment and finally there I couldn't open Windows Task Manager with the normal shortcut "CTRL + SHIFT + ESC",  so I had to do it through MS-DOS command prompt, this is quite easy but still everyone forgets about it or maybe just don't know it, honestly I will be the first one to forget it, so I decided to share it with the world and at the same time keep the knowledge in a safe place.

How to disable Kubuntu login sound

I don't know about you, but in my case the login sound can be a problem at home while rebooting the system when my wife is sleeping, so I took a couple of minutes to find out how to disable it and here it is.
 

1. Go to "System Settings"
2. Click on "Notifications"
3. Select "KDE System Notifications" from the drop-down menu
4. Find the "Login" event
5. Untick the "Play a sound" option and that's it.

Here you can check the screenshot

Setting Java Virtual Machine memory heap size for your server

Do you need to set the heap size (min and max) available for the java virtual machine being used by your server? well I ran into that annoying OutOfMemoryError message today and I took a couple of screenshots describing how to do it, check it out.

Here you can see WebSphere's console:

In this other case I used Eclipse, you can check how to set the values in the virtual machine parameters at the server connector tab for Geronimo:

 

Java version being used by your server

Today I was solving an issue on different environments and I had to check the Java version being used in BEA Weblogic, IBM WebSphere and Apache Geronimo, it is not difficult but again I thought it would be useful to share it with everyone.

Here you can see how to check the Java version through the log in the Weblogic console:

In this case for WebSphere, you can see where to find the version by directly checking the log file:

The final screenshot is from Geronimo, with a lot of information about Java:

How to get rid of Internet Explorer

I am not a big fan of Microsoft products and using Internet Explorer is one of the most painful experiences I have to go through while testing a UI for a web development or just while browsing the intranet at work, but today I took a look at a Firefox addon that allows you to open an IE tab inside Firefox called (not surprisingly) IE Tab.

The best part of it is that I can add trusted sites just as in IE, something that is not available in the current version of FF, and this avoids having to enter my credentials every time I go to a different page in the intranet! The addon is not perfect, IE 8 sites don’t look exactly the same but still it helps a lot while testing previous versions.

That’s it for now ;)

Javac OutOfMemory error while compiling with Ant

Did you get this OutOfMemory error message from javac  while compiling with ant:

“The system is out of resources.

Consult the following stack trace for details.

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space”

Well there is an easy way to fix it! first set property “fork” to true, this will allow javac to execute in a separate thread with its own resources, then you can set the values for “memoryinitialsize” and “memorymaximumsize” according to your needs. Here is a sample of how the javac task would look.

 <javac  
     fork="true"
     srcdir="${basedir}/src"  
     destdir="${basedir}/build/classes"  
     classpath="${project.classpath}"  
     memoryinitialsize="256m"  
     memorymaximumsize="256m"
 />  

That’s it! I hope it helps ;)

How to remove dotted lines from blogger (bottom)

Yesterday I removed dotted lines from the top of each post from Google Blogger, but I didn't have enough time to check how to remove them at the bottom, so today I took a look at it and here it goes for anyone else that needs it:

• Login to you Blogger account and go to Layout -> Edit HTML

• Ctrl + F "border-bottom:1px dotted $bordercolor;" it should be located in something like this

.post {
margin:.5em 0 1.5em;
border-bottom:1px dotted $bordercolor;
padding-bottom:1.5em;
}

• Set "border-bottom" to zero

.post {
margin:.5em 0 1.5em;
border-bottom:0px dotted $bordercolor;
padding-bottom:1.5em;
} 

• Save and check your blog

How to remove dotted lines from blogger

I personally don't like blogger's dotted lines on each post title, so with some help from Greasemonkey and after taking a look at the HTML  template I managed to removed them with a simple line of code:

1. Login you blogger account and go to Layout -> Edit HTML
2. Ctrl + F "]]>"
3. Copy this "a {outline:none;}"  before the result of step 2
4. Save and check your blog

That's it! I hope it helps ;)

Remove svn folders recursively

Today I was about to zip and send some code folders to a co-worker, at that point what I needed was a simple feature to remove all svn related things from this folder and recursively through all subfolders, I still don't know isn't this included as a feature by kdesvn, eSvn, QSvn or RapidSVN.

I'm a Linux user so this will do the trick:

find . -name ".svn" -exec rm -rf {} \;
 

In case you are using Windows and probably Tortoise you can go this way:

Export the current copy and choose a different folder, it will copy the code there and it will remove all svn things. Beware that if you choose the same folder Tortoise will just remove things without copying anything.

Well I hope this helps ;)

Geronimo Load Balancing database deployment

Recently I had the need to deploy a new datasource in Apache Geronimo, usually this would be a five minutes process that will just require a quick update of the deployment plan similar to this one:

 <connector xmlns="http://geronimo.apache.org/xml/ns/j2ee/connector-1.2">  
   <dep:environment xmlns:dep="http://geronimo.apache.org/xml/ns/deployment-1.2">  
     <dep:moduleId>  
       <dep:groupId>console.dbpool</dep:groupId>  
       <dep:artifactId>jdbc.myapp.mydb</dep:artifactId>  
       <dep:version>1.0</dep:version>  
       <dep:type>rar</dep:type>  
     </dep:moduleId>  
     <dep:dependencies>  
       <dep:dependency>  
         <dep:groupId>oracle</dep:groupId>  
         <dep:artifactId>ojdbc5</dep:artifactId>  
         <dep:version>11.1.0.6.0</dep:version>  
         <dep:type>jar</dep:type>  
       </dep:dependency>  
     </dep:dependencies>  
   </dep:environment>  
   <resourceadapter>  
     <outbound-resourceadapter>  
       <connection-definition>  
         <connectionfactory-interface>javax.sql.DataSource</connectionfactory-interface>  
         <connectiondefinition-instance>  
           <name>jdbc.myapp.mydb</name>  
                          <config-property-setting name="Password">mypass</config-property-setting>  
           <config-property-setting name="UserName">myuser</config-property-setting>  
                          <config-property-setting name="DatabaseName">DB113</config-property-setting>  
                          <config-property-setting name="DataSourceName">mydb</config-property-setting>  
                          <config-property-setting name="ServerName">myserver</config-property-setting>  
                          <config-property-setting name="PortNumber">1521</config-property-setting>  
                          <config-property-setting name="DriverType">thin</config-property-setting>  
           <connectionmanager>  
             <xa-transaction>  
               <transaction-caching/>  
             </xa-transaction>  
             <single-pool>  
               <max-size>10</max-size>  
               <min-size>0</min-size>  
                                    <blocking-timeout-milliseconds>5</blocking-timeout-milliseconds>  
               <idle-timeout-minutes>1</idle-timeout-minutes>  
               <match-one/>  
             </single-pool>  
           </connectionmanager>  
         </connectiondefinition-instance>  
       </connection-definition>  
     </outbound-resourceadapter>  
   </resourceadapter>  
 </connector>  

But in this case I needed to deploy a database with load balancing, since I couldn't find this info online I thought about sharing with everyone the deployment plan that worked for me, it is similar to the previous one and the difference is in the "connectiondefinition-instance" element:

         <connectiondefinition-instance>  
           <name>jdbc.rf2h.mydb</name>  
           <config-property-setting name="Driver">oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver</config-property-setting>  
           <config-property-setting name="Password">mypass</config-property-setting>  
           <config-property-setting name="UserName">myuser</config-property-setting>  
           <config-property-setting name="ConnectionURL">jdbc:oracle:thin:@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = 192.8.231.8)(PORT = 1521))(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = 192.8.231.9)(PORT = 1521))(LOAD_BALANCE = yes)(CONNECT_DATA = (SERVER = DEDICATED)(SERVICE_NAME = db313))  
                          </config-property-setting>  
                          <config-property-setting name="CommitBeforeAutocommit">true</config-property-setting>  
           <connectionmanager>  
             <local-transaction/>  
             <single-pool>  
               <max-size>5</max-size>  
               <min-size>1</min-size>  
               <blocking-timeout-milliseconds>30</blocking-timeout-milliseconds>  
               <idle-timeout-minutes>1</idle-timeout-minutes>  
               <match-one/>  
             </single-pool>  
           </connectionmanager>  
         </connectiondefinition-instance>                      

As you can see, all the info about the load balance is in this "ConnectionURL" property, that's it, I hope this helps ;)

PS: for this deployment I used the following library: geronimo-tomcat6-javaee5-2.1.2\repository\org\tranql\tranql-connector-ra\1.4\tranql-connector-ra-1.4.rar

Upgrade to Karmic Koala (Kubuntu 9.10)

The new version Karmic Koala was just released this week and I took a few hours during the weekend to upgrade my system. The download and install process through the upgrade manager went out perfectly until I had to restart and noticed the following errors:

"init:sreadahead main process terminated with status 1 init"

and

"One or more of the mounts listed in /etc/fstab cannot yet be mounted: 
(ESC for recovery shell)
/: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx"

To solve the first issue find the follwing lines in your /etc/init/sreadahead.conf file

“start on starting mountall

stop on stopped rc”


And replace the first line like this:

“#start on starting mountall

start on filesystem”

To solve the second issue edit the following in your /etc/fstab file:

- Disable fsck on vfat by setting to "0" the value in the last column of you vfat entry this way

“UUID=XXXX-XXX /media/hda1 vfat defaults,utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 0”

- Replace all UUID by /dev/sdxx

After this changes the error was still there, then I noticed that during startup my old kernels were the only option in the grub menu and I couldn´t access the one installed during the upgrade. Googling the issue resulted in a forum thread that describes this solution:

- Make your devices writable again:

“mount -n -o remount,rw /”
- Install broken packages (it took a while for me):
“sudo dpkg --configure -a”
- Now you should be able to reboot the system and access 9.10!

In case you want more info about the fstab file you can check this link.

That´s it for now!