Ubuntu 11.04 introduced a new, cleaner user interface called Unity. I’m not a huge desktop GUI guy, doing a large majority of my work in the command line, but I do like to try and stay current on the latest greatest interfaces.

I’m not overwhelmed with Unity. It’s OK but not really earth shattering. You have the option to switch back to the “classic” Gnome interface if you wanted to but I haven’t done that.

One huge annoyance I’ve noticed about the new Unity interface was a lack of a true “system tray”. Many application in Ubuntu (or Linux in general) leverage a similar approach Windows machine do and allow applications to run in a System Tray, cleaning up any task bars you might have. In Unity, there were a couple applications that were visible, like Dropbox, the clock and Volume but several others were not such as Skype and Truecrypt.

This became a big problem for Truecrypt because once I closed the Truecrypt interface I couldn’t figure out how to get back to it. If I tried to launch the application again the system would report that it the application was already running, which it was. In the past I would get back to the interface through the icon in the system tray but this icon would not display in Unity, at least not until I found a posting on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=6723083591&topic=17003

This simple command in a terminal window corrected my problem and life is good again

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['all']"

As you can see I got all my system tray icons back and I am now a little happier with Unity.

Posted via email from shocm

Being an “Open Source” guy there is a certain stigma that goes along with that title, one being that everything you use has to be Open Source. Where I take great pride in the knowledge there isn’t really any aspect of my digital life I couldn’t do without an Open Source solution, I personally don’t necessarily make Open Source a “requirement”. I always look for the best solution and tool for a particular task, for me freedom and access to the code weighs heavily in that decision but is not the only parameters in picking a solution.

In the interest of full discloser, and because there are people who enjoy pointing out when they “catch me” not using Open Source (as if I don’t know), I present to you a list of my Non-Open Source guilty pleasures that I use frequently (with some justification for using them)

Note: with the exceptions of OSX and the Microsoft products all solutions below do offer free versions of their products though I typically pay for the upgraded products.

Desktop

• Evernote (http://www.evernote.com) – There are several alternatives to Evernote, including Open Sources ones such as Tomboy but they all seem to lack either features or cross platform compatibility. Evernote does have a OSX and Windows client but no client for Linux which has always been a huge draw back. Evernote does have a pretty good web interface, which continues to improve and this helps a lot when I am on my Linux desktops. Evernote also have a lot of open APIs and there has been some activity to writing alternative Evernote clients that will run on Linux desktops including one I’ve checked out called Nevernote (http://nevernote.sourceforge.net/)
• Navicat (http://www.navicat.com/) – I simple like this tool. The user interface and feature set is wonderful. There are tons of Open Source GUI clients to connect to MySQL database and even though 99% on my database activity is connecting to a MySQL backend every now and then I need to connect to MSSQL, Oracle, or PostgreSQL and my Navicat Premium allows me to do this in one client. It also has a wonderful feature of establishing my MySQL connections over SSH which I love when I need to work on my Windows boxes. It’s baked in so I don’t have to establish my own separate SSH tunnel. They also have clients for Windows, OSX, and Linux
• Dropbox (http://db.tt/AyOLUYV) – I have to be honest, I’ve used Dropbox for several years but it is always on my hit list to move to an alternative Open Source solution. There seems to be a new one that drops every month. When I get comfortable with the staying power and feature set that Dropbox offer, I will probably drop Dropbox.
• OSX (http://www.apple.com/macosx/) – This is really a decision of convince than anything else. There are typically a greater number “vendor support” desktop application that are not support on Linux desktops such as the previously mentioned Evernote. However OSX is BSD at heart and lets me retain a lot of the Open Source tools I am accustomed to on my Linux desktop including a very power command line and scripting ability. My OSX desktop also affords me the unique benefit of running virtualization software such as Virtualbox (http://www.virtualbox.org/) and allow me to run Windows, several Linux distributions, and OSX all on one physical machine. This is really nice especially when needing to do testing.

Servers

• Splunk (http://www.splunk.com/) – Of all the proprietary products I use Splunk is probably the one I am most wishful would go full Open Source or someone would start a Open Source project to match the abilities on Splunk. Splunk is kind of hard to explain but think if Google went to a Unix party where the command lines tail and grep were hanging out and they all hooked up together. Splunk would we the result of that. This is a crazy cool and powerful tool that your typical end user probably not appreciate or understand, you really need to be some sort of systems administrator or hard core, log loving, developer to really embrace and appreciate it. Splunk has very open APIs that access the core of their system which is nice because as a developer you are able to extend and build onto the product, but the core itself is proprietary. This means the core can change breaking whatever you built to extend it and you don’t have the option of forking the old core and continuing down whatever path you feel is better.

Software as a Services or SaaS – SaaS is an interesting arena. Where many of the services are built on Open Source solutions, the service themselves are proprietary, but at the same time their “Cloud” nature is about accessibility hence they typically have a lot of open API that allow you to tie into and develop for the service in many ways. My justification for these services is typically unilaterally related to accessibility.

• Remember The Milk (http://www.rememberthemilk.com/) – Great task management system
• Grooveshark/Pandora/mSpot – I’m not a big iTunes guy and enjoy always being able to get to my music as well as enjoy the ability to discover new music.
• Google Docs / GMail – Not a huge fan of Google Docs functionality but having the ability to collaborate and share supersedes that.
• Twitter/Posterous/Facebook/Other Misc Microblogging services – Just general online social life stuff.

Exceptions (Disclosure to my Disclosure)

• Microsoft Stack (Windows7/Office/Outlook/Visio/Project/blah/blah/blah) – From a work perspective the company I work for makes heavy use of a Microsoft including Exchange, Sharepoint, and Windows Desktops. Because of that, and the fact that there are company policies around “acceptable and supported desktops”, you may see me using one of these products. I’m not to say I initially avoid these products, I just don’t naturally gravitate to them.

Posted via email from shocm

I am a very heavy user of SSH, like everyday all day type of user. I know a couple cool SSH tricks like port forwarding and mapping remote drives. One thing that always bugged me was the lack of auto complete when I was on my OSX machine. You see with SSH, you can define a bunch of individual host and configurations unique to those host in a file called .ssh/config. It’s a great tool to have and when you do have some host define, on a Linux machine, you can type in the command ssh, then the first couple if letters of the host and hit tab. It will act as any tab completion does for commands and fill in as much of the hostname as it can before it requires some other unique identifier. However, this cool autocomplete feature didn’t happen naturally of my OSX box.

Through the years, I’ve had an idea of what I needed to do to create my own script to handle it. There is the complete command, the trick is grepping the config file and pulling out the right information. I decided to be lazy and just manually created several alias for my ssh server. The alias approach worked, but this grew into a very long list of alias and wasn’t very efficient. So tonight I decided I was going to write the script to meet my needs and about 2 clicks on Google links later, I found someone who had actually already completely done it. Nem W. Schlecht posted his script on a Macworld hints forum a couple years ago. Here is a link to that original thread http://goo.gl/Wd4Z5 but the piece of magic that did the trick is below. As a added bonus, it also creates auto complete from servers it finds in your known_host file. I will repost his post, not just the code, because he has some wise advice on where to place the code

The macports suggestion is a good one, but IMO, includes too much. If you don’t have macports installed, you can add the following to your .bash_profile (I wouldn’t add it to my .bashrc, since that gets read in by cron jobs and remote commands).

There are a couple improvements here. First, this will also read in aliases in your ~/.ssh/config file. Secondly, it will ignore commented out entries in your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. Finally, this is a function and not a static list. Thus, it is immediately aware of any new additions to either file (although on really slow machines it will be slower than a static list).

_complete_ssh_hosts ()
{
        COMPREPLY=()
        cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"
        comp_ssh_hosts=`cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts | \
                        cut -f 1 -d ' ' | \
                        sed -e s/,.*//g | \
                        grep -v ^# | \
                        uniq | \
                        grep -v "\[" ;
                cat ~/.ssh/config | \
                        grep "^Host " | \
                        awk '{print $2}'
                `
        COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "${comp_ssh_hosts}" -- $cur))
        return 0
}
complete -F _complete_ssh_hosts ssh

Don’t forget you need to “source” you file to get the new command to load in your terminal or you can close your terminal window and open a new one.

Posted via email from shocm

After doing some Googling I discovered that once you got past the login screen the keyboard would work fine. The only way to login was to initiate the on-screen keyboard and type in your password. You can bring up the on-screen keyboard by clicking on the Universal Access icon on the lower right hand side of the screen and choosing “Use on-screen keyboard”. One side note here, when I first checked the box to use the on-screen keyboard, the keyboard would flash and disappear. What I needed to do was keep the box check and reboot the machine, when the login screen returned, the keyboard was there.

Once I logged in the physical keyboard worked fine. I was able to use it in all the applications and didn’t notice any problems, but once I logged out and returned to the login screen, again no input from the physical keyboard. Now I needed to fix this.

What didn’t work

At this point I go into basic trouble resolution mode and decided to start by reinstalling and upgrading the VMWare tools. Not going to get into a step by step here how to do that but the short of it is after reinstalling the VMWare tools and rebooting I was stuck in the same situation and needed to use the on-screen keyboard to log in. Next obvious step, apply all patches to the Ubuntu desktop, did this, rebooted, still no go.

What did work

Clearly, you are not reading this article to learn how not to fix it. Trust me after doing enough searches there are plenty discussion threads out there with “This doesn’t work for me either, anyone fix this yet?” to keep you reading for hours. I found a couple good links that I will post at the end of this article that got things resolved. The short answer is I logged into the machine, fired up and console window, type in the command

sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

For keyboard I selected “Apple” and then just selected the defaults for everything else. Once I exited the configuration wizard, I restarted the machine and all was right with the Ubuntu world again. Did a couple reboots to make sure and everything seems to be working fine now.

One more side note

This issue  occurred on a clean install of the current Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release. I had been previously running the beta version of the 10.04 release which worked fine and never had a problem with the keyboard input. However, after patching that box today, same issue occurred.

The Links

Two links basically lead me to my resolution

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1466482 – A great thread discussion on the issue in general. There were a couple of “fixes” in there including the one I implemented. A couple of post go off track but for the most paart a good thread.
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/548891 – The bug report on the issue which also includes the work around.

This is another post that is more of a note to myself than anything else. Been doing a lot of Nagios configuring and decided to implement the ability to push commands from the web interface. I followed the basic instructions to configure “External Commands” but after doing and going to the web interface to test it, I got the following error message;

Error: Could not stat() command file '/var/lib/nagios3/rw/nagios.cmd'!

The external command file may be missing, Nagios may not be running, and/or Nagios may not be checking external commands.  An error occurred while attempting to commit your command for processing.

The file was there so I did what any good geek should do, I did a quick google search. The closet thing I could find was some commands to fix the issue on Debian systems. Since I was running Ubuntu, which is for all intensive purposes Debian, I figured I would try it.  So I ran the following set of command;

sudo /etc/init.d/nagios3 stop
sudo dpkg-statoverride --update --add nagios www-data 2710 /var/lib/nagios3/rw
sudo dpkg-statoverride --update --add nagios nagios 751 /var/lib/nagios3
sudo /etc/init.d/nagios3 start

This worked like a charm and the web interface began accepting commands.

Currently, Sony has enabled the community for “SNAP” which is an application framework for consumer electronic devices. From the SNAP site;

“SNAP stands for Sony’s Networked Application Platform and is part of an emerging new ecosystem for making downloadable applications available to networked devices like TV’s, Blu-ray Disk players and other Consumer Electronic products. SNAP is in the very early stages of development and has a lot of room to grow”

This will open an avenue that will allow developers to get their applications onto SNAP enabled devices such as televisions. SNAP is based on the GNUstep community, whose origin dates back to the OpenStep standard developed by NeXT Computer Inc (now Apple Computer Inc.) which also implements the extensions added by Apple in the form of Cocoa. The main language on GNUstep for SNAP is ObjectiveC and the SNAP development web site points a lot of great resources on ObjectC from beginners guide to optimization.

Sony offers a guides and a SDK for download to start with your development efforts. It’s mentioned on the SNAP web site that some good examples of applications would be “Games, Widgets (weather, news, traffic, etc), remote controls, social apps, media sharing apps, media players, home automation”. Also according to the web site Sony will be hosting contest in the future for SNAP developers with prizes ranging from Sony televisions to Sony Walkman.

Another section of the Sony Developer Web site will be the dash section, which is currently unavailable but from what I’ve heard should be opened in the coming weeks. dash is the Sony new Personal Internet Viewer. Developed with Flex, Sony is hoping to encourage and foster application developed on the dash product.

The issue

I am running OSX 10.6.2 and although I had Ruby on Rails working on it at one time, some how, some where it broke. Now there is nothing more frustrating to a n00b who is trying to work through a tutorial on how to learn a new programming language and not being able to get past the first chapter because something about the base install of the programming language that you don’t know anything about and you’re trying to learn, wont work.

The Actual Error

When I try to create my first controller this is what happens

ruby script/generate controller main welcome

And this is what the system kicked out to me

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rails-2.3.5/lib/initializer.rb:271:in `require_frameworks': RubyGem version error: rack(1.0.0 not ~> 1.0.1) (RuntimeError)

from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rails-2.3.5/lib/initializer.rb:134:in `process'
from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rails-2.3.5/lib/initializer.rb:113:in `send'
from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rails-2.3.5/lib/initializer.rb:113:in `run'
from /Users/eric/Dropbox/Code/Rails/r4music1/config/environment.rb:9
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require'
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rails-2.3.5/lib/commands/generate.rb:1
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require'
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
from script/generate:3

Sidebar
Naturally, the first thing I do is start hitting Google and start clicking on links. A lot of similar issues with a wide variety of solutions. From just doing a simple ‘sudo gem update’, to making sure rake is installed, to making sure you have the correct rake version installed. None of which worked for me. Finally, I stumbled onto Wojno’ Site and following the steps in his post I manage to resolve my problem.

The Fix
If you didn’t want to click on Wonjno’s link here are the steps that fixed my problem. Had to change a couple of things because my install paths were a little different since I was running a different OS.
We begin by uninstalling the problem package

sudo gem uninstall rack

When prompted, make sure you remove all versions of the rack packages. Now this is one place where my experience differed a little. I ended up getting prompted to uninstall rails itself. I’m a brave soul, that didn’t scare me, so yeah I uninstalled it.
Here is what that looked like

sudo gem uninstall rack
Remove executables: rackup in addition to the gem? [Yn]  Y
Removing rackup
You have requested to uninstall the gem: rack-1.0.0
actionpack-2.3.3 depends on [rack (~> 1.0.0)]
actionpack-2.3.5 depends on [rack (~> 1.0.0)]
If you remove this gems, one or more dependencies will not be met.
Continue with Uninstall? [Yn]  Y

OK, that was a little scary but we will fix it.
I did manually remove the directory for the older version of rack

sudo rm -rf /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rack-1.0.1/

Now we reinstall things. Don’t forget we need to reinstall the rails itself

sudo gem install -v=2.3.5 rails
sudo gem install rack

After that, life was good, at least for me. If you found this article and actually read it in hopes that it helped fix your issue, well then I hope you had some success as well.

Posted via web from shocm

I just love this concept. I can imagine homes of the future being built with this technology built into it. The thought of just laying down your phone or MP3 player on the table and it getting charged while there is just cool.

Well now lump Eric Van Johnson in this category, hopefully minus the legal issues for awhile. In what will most certainly send this companies revenues through the roof, I have done my first video “endorsement” of a product. Now this is not my first brush with Internet stardom, a few years back I got my picture taken with Irina Slutsky of GETV but that was different she was more stalking me than anything else, this time it was business.

Oddly enough it’s not an Open Source product and I don’t even particularly care for it’s licensing model but with that aside, the product itself is very solid. Splunk on the most basic level is a indexing and search service for system log files. But its extendability really expands the product much further than just that.

Check out my video endorsement and then go and buy stock in this company. Mind you they are not publicly traded at this time but you shouldn’t let that stop you as they are obviously going to go main stream now that they have me doing commercials for them

Splunk> Eric Van Johnson

http://www.splunk.com/article/2741