kong's blog

Bye Bye Blogger...

2006-04-29T21:53:00.000+07:00

Yeah, I've moved to a new site -- suksit.com (That's my first name ^^). Because I miss some features that Blogger does not provide so I just create my own blog using Drupal.

However, thanks to Blogger for providing me a place to start blogging :)

Emacs and X.Org rgb

2006-04-23T22:35:00.000+07:00

Due to Blognone Tech Day 2006 effect, I came home and installed Emacs to try it out. emerge -av emacs went fine without any errors but when I try to start emacs from Terminal, here's what I got:

$ emacs
Undefined color: "black"

Googling around, I found that Emacs was looking for "rgb.txt" which did not exist on my system.

This is because I'm using X11R7.0 -- a completely modularized X Window System, and it doesn't come with all the tools like X11R6.x package. So I have to manually emerge -av rgb to get the rgb application.

After emerge finished, I tried to run Emacs again and still got the same error. Another google search, it suggested I should take a look at /etc/X11/xorg.conf for RgbPath. In my xorg.conf, it reads:

RgbPath "/usr/lib/X11/rgb"

But "rgb.txt" wasn't there, so where is it? I typed in locate rgb.txt and found that the file was in /usr/share/X11. Then I modified xorg.conf according to the path that locate told me:

RgbPath "/usr/share/X11/rgb"

Restarted X, called up Terminal, typed "emacs" then hit Enter... and wheeeee! Emacs popped up! Time to check it out!

ps. Now I know one Emacs command -- C-x C-c :P

Blognone Tech Day 2006

2006-04-22T23:45:00.000+07:00

Today I went to Blognone Tech Day 2006 seminar at Kasetsart University from 1.00pm to 5.30pm. The concept of the seminar was "Developer's Exchange", which was a mixed of various topics.

Each topic was described in a short and easy-to-understand way -- mainly to give the concept/overview about the topic and to introduce the presenter whom the audiences can contact later if they need more details.

Here're the topics covered today:

Ruby on Rails by Polawat Phetra
I was late and by the time I arrived the presentation was almost finish. However, I still had a chance to see some demos and was impressed to see that your can create an AJAX-ed webpage with only a few lines of Ruby code.
Python on Zope by Sugree Phatanapherom
Couldn't really catch up the details because I was sitting in the far back and could not see well. However, I think it's more difficult than RoR, and Sugree said there are not many hosts that support Zope. So just knowing that "Zope" exists is enough for me :)
Mono: Open Source .NET Framework by Wiennat
A nice presentation about .NET Framework architecture, why Mono was developed and its features. BTW, Mono = Monkey XD
Emacs: Hacker's Text Editor by Poonlap
Brief history of Emacs and introduction of its features. I've never seen a text editor that is capable of playing games, surfing internet, checking emails or even providing an AI to talk to. I just came back and emerged emacs right away, gotta try it!
IP PBX using Asterisk by Dome Charoenyost
Completely lost about what the presenter said (out of my field, I guess). But we sure did enjoy the presentation and laughted a lot ^^
Linux Virtualization using Xen by Somphol Boonjing
Shows another solution for virtual hosting on Linux. But I still think VMWare is better...
Game Theory by Jittat Fakcharoenphol
Describes the Nobel Prize-winning theory of John Nash (there is a movie about him -- A Beautiful Mind). There were a bunch of examples, but I'm still not clear about how can it be used in real life =.=
Emerging Technology 2006 by ปรเมศวร์ มินศิริ
Shows that the world is walking towards Web 2.0. In the future, all applications will run on internet and will be platform-independent.
Thai Word Breaking using ZWSP by Wason Liwlompaisan
An idea of how to break Thai words correctly e.g. "ตากลม" can be separated into "ตา-กลม" and "ตาก-ลม" and both words do make sense. Lew's solution is to have a special Unicode character -- "ZWSP" (I guess it stands for something like "Zero-Width Space") -- inserted between each word. It seems to be an elegant solution but I still wonder how can we manage to input this special charecter between each word we typed?

Phew!... Quite a lot of topics in just 4 hrs and a half, right? However, it helps opening my vision about programming and new technology a lot. And I just love the Blognone t-shirt!! Hope there will be a seminar like this again :)

ps. Too bad I didn't get the Ubuntu Stickers :(

DOS vs UNIX line breaks

2006-04-18T17:05:00.000+07:00

I was writing a shell script to parse some data in csv format generated by Microsoft Excel and was wondering why the script didn't work as I expected.

I took a look at the .csv file using more command and it looked OK to me...

Half an hour passed by and I still cannot figure the problem out, I used vi to open the csv file and saw that there were additional ^M characters everywhere in the file.

After googling around for a while, I found that the ^M's were there because the csv file contained "carriage return (\r)" characters, which is the default line break character in Windows, instead of "new line (\n)" characters as it should be. To fix this problem, I have to execute the command

tr "\r" "\n" < inputdata.csv > gooddata.csv

to remove all ^M's and after that my script worked just fine.

Xfce 4.4 beta1 released!

2006-04-18T09:32:00.000+07:00

Image from Xfce Diary

Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for various *NIX systems. Designed for productivity, it loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources.

Xfce 4.4 beta1 was released yesterday. Here are some new features:

Thunar File Manager a new file manager that replaces xffm.
Desktop Icons the most requested feature is now implemented.
Panel is completely rewritten. You can now add/remove as many panel as you wish, panel plugins can be downloaded at xfce-goodies, including xfapplet which allows you to use GNOME applet on Xfce panel.
Others
- Preferred Applications allows you to choose default application for web browsing, mail reading etc.
- Mousepad a notepad-like application for Xfce
- Orage a calendar application for Xfce. I'll just use Google Calendar anyway ;)

More info and screenshots are available at Xfce Diary. Give it a try! And you may never want to use GNOME or KDE again XD

Gmail File Space

2006-04-16T15:28:00.000+07:00

If you are using Firefox and Gmail, there's a cool extension called gspace which allows you to use Gmail as your file storage. It's similar to Gmail Drive in term of functions -- to store and retrieve files from your Gmail account.

But unlike Gmail Drive, which can only be used on Windows, gspace runs on Firefox -- which means it can be used on (hopefully) any platform that supports Firefox. Well, at least it runs on my Gentoo Linux box :)

To use gspace, you'll need:

Mozilla Firefox (of course!) with
gspace extension
A Gmail account

Just install the extension and restart Firefox and you're done. Start gspace by selecting Tools > GSpace menu in Firefox.

gspace UI looks just like an FTP client (screenshot from gspace website is here), you can select a file from your computer and upload it to your Gmail account, or download a file from your Gmail account to your harddisk. It's that simple!

One thing I don't like about Blogger.com

2006-04-13T22:16:00.000+07:00

Is that I cannot categorize my blog entries. At first, I think this blog will be about my experience using Linux and open source softwares. But after a while, I found that there are many things I want to write about and I just have a feeling that there should be a way to group the same kind of posts together using tag or category. It not only helps finding a post easier but also gives an overview of what my blog is about to the visitors.

Why didn't google implement this feature? Or maybe it's already there but I just don't know?

Now I'm looking for a Wordpress host and found some interesing ones e.g. Blogsome, Blogthing and Wordpress.com (actually I got these links from the closed signup page of Weblogs.us)

Hmmm... -_-a

Bangkok International Book Fair 2006

2006-04-09T11:57:00.000+07:00

Here're the books that I bought:

Cool Firefox Wallpapers

2006-04-06T22:56:00.000+07:00

(image from OpenSourcePal.org)

I was looking for a new wallpaper at deviantART and saw this Nova - Mozilla Firefox wallpaper. The author's comment said he made it for the contest at OpenSourcePal.org so I followed the link.

There are many nice wallpapers there, all of them are related to open source softwares such as Firefox, Thunderbird, OOo, some Linux distros etc. If you're a Firefox fan, I'm sure you don't wanna miss it.

Fixing Azureus Error Messages

2006-04-06T17:06:00.000+07:00

Every time I start Azureus(2.4.0.2) on my Gentoo Linux box, two error messages will pop up, saying

Open Error '' could not be opened: Not a file

and

Error Failed to access torrent file ''. Ensure sufficient temporary file space available (check browser cache usage).

That looks like Azureus tries to open a file with empty name every time it starts up. And if you take a look at the file /usr/bin/azureus, you will see that the line responsible for calling up Azureus reads:

java -cp $(java-config -p systray4j,azureus-bin 2>/dev/null) -Djava.library.path="${AZDIR}" org.gudy.azureus2.ui.swt.Main "$1"

So the problem is when we start Azureus with no arguments, $1 will become an empty string, and Azureus will try to find a file named '', which, of course, does not exist.

To fix this, we have to check whether $1 is empty or not, and then call Azureus in appropriate way. What I did is replacing that line with:

if [ "$1" == "" ]; then
    java -cp $(java-config -p systray4j,azureus-bin 2>/dev/null) -Djava.library.path="${AZDIR}" org.gudy.azureus2.ui.swt.Main
else
    java -cp $(java-config -p systray4j,azureus-bin 2>/dev/null) -Djava.library.path="${AZDIR}" org.gudy.azureus2.ui.swt.Main "$1"
fi

And no more error messages on startup! :)

A story of destin… er distro’s.

2006-04-02T11:23:00.000+07:00

I just bumped into this post @ CoffeeBuzz's Linux Blog.

(quoted from original post)

2 people (Bob and his girlfriend Claire) are completely new to Linux. Claire decides shes UBER l33T!?!!111 and decides to install Gentoo. Bob, being an experienced windows user decides to play it safe in GUI-land with ubuntu...

revdep-rebuild

2006-03-31T20:47:00.000+07:00

Yesterday after I executed emerge --sync && emerge -uDav world to update my system, portage asked whether I want to update expat-1.95.8 to expat-2.0.0 so I answered yes. Emerge went fine with no error and I was about to surf the internet. I clicked on the Firefox icon but after a few minutes, nothing showed up. So I tried clicking it again (in case I missed :P), the harddisk LED blinked for a few times then stop and Firefox window never appeared.

I thought "well I should try starting it from the command line so that I can see some error messages", so I clicked on the Terminal icon to bring up a new terminal emulator. But, as you may guess, nothing popped up.

After a few more clicks, I found that most of my Xfce stuffs, Thunar, OpenOffice.org and some other apps using gtk were also broken!

However, I still had a Terminal left opened after emerging the update so I tried to run Firefox and a few other apps using command line and found that they all complained about "cannot find libexpat.so.0". After that I tried to re-emerge Terminal, Thunar and the whole Xfce stuffs. After re-emerging, those applications worked again.

Now the question was how many apps do I have to re-emerge? I tried the command equery d expat and got about 5-6 packages that depend on expat. I re-emerge them all except Firefox and OpenOffice.org because it was too time-consuming. But the result was not what I expected, I still could not open gThumb, Gaim, EasyTAG etc.

The problem was that most of the broken apps were not listed when I executed the equery command above. This was annoying, I didn't know exactly which apps need to be re-emerged. I could not access Gentoo Forums because Firefox was the only browser installed on the system and I was too sleepy to re-emerge Firefox (it would take more than an hour with my AthlonXP 1600+). So I decided to run emerge -e world to rebuild everything and went to bed. Yeah that was silly, I know =.=

Nevertheless, this evening I got my system up and running. Then I went to Gentoo Forums and found a sticky post about expat-2.0.0 in no time. They suggest running revdep-rebuild to fix the problem, which I never knew before. I always thought that revdep-rebuild is to be used after running emerge --depclean only!

Well, at least the next time this happen again I will know what to do >_<

REAL Transparent Terminal

2006-03-28T20:00:00.001+07:00

Many terminal emulators in Linux come with so-called "Transparent background" option, which makes your terminal window *LOOKS* transparent by displaying your desktop wallpaper as terminal background instead of a solid color. This looks good if you have only one terminal window on your desktop, but if you have many windows placed over each other, you'll get a feeling that this "transparency" is fake (well, at least that's what I feel :P).

Thanks to Benedikt Meurer @ Xfce Diary, who did the transparent Terminal hack to enable *REAL* transparency in Terminal (a very popular terminal emulator used by Xfce users).

This hack consists of two patches, which you can find from the link above. In addition, here're things that you need for these patches:

Latest Terminal from SVN
xfce4-dev-tools (to compile Terminal)
VTE 0.11.18 (the author mentioned it should also work with newer versions)

Once I applied the patches and re-compiled Terminal and VTE, here's the result.

Quite impressive, isn't it? :)

Firefox and gcc Optimization Flag

2006-03-26T09:08:00.000+07:00

As you might already know, to optimize Gentoo we have to set a couple of variables which impact Portage behaviour. Those variables are stored in /etc/make.conf. Some of the important variables are CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, which define the optimization flags for the gcc and C++ compiler respectively. My CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS are defined as follow:

CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -pipe -O3"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

(quoted from Gentoo Linux x86 Handbook)

One of the options in CFLAGS is the -O flag (that is capital O, not zero), which specifies the gcc optimization class flag. Possible classes are s (for size-optimized), 0 (zero - for no optimizations), 1, 2 or 3 for more speed-optimization flags.

As you see, I use -O3 for more speed optimization and that works well with most applications on my Gentoo box.

However, when I use Firefox on this machine I noticed some strange behaviour such as the font size is not the same as what I configured in Preferences. No matter what size I specified in the "Minimum font size" setting, it always show as small font as possible. So I have to hit Ctrl + "+" several times in order to be able to read the content of the web.

Moreover, sometimes when I move back/forward between each page, the font size just randomly got decreased automatically, which is quite annoying.

I saw some people discuss about this problem in Gentoo Forums and they said it's Firefox 1.5.0 's bug. Some even suggest to downgrade to Firefox 1.0.7 but I don't think that's a good idea.

So I have been living with the font problem like for a month, then I got a new problem . My Firefox just doesn't like some web site, sometimes when I click on a link from Google, or try to read an email in my Gmail account, Firefox crashes! Fortunately I have installed Tab Mix Plus extension, which can restore the last session I was surfing before Firefox crashed -- but that's not the right solution for sure.

This time I'm pretty certain that the problem is related to the optimization flag because I have read it somewhere and it said more speed optimization = less stable software. So I edited the /etc/make.conf and put -O2 instead of -O3 and executed emerge -av mozilla-firefox before I went to bed last night...

This morning I came to check the results, emerge went fine and Firefox seems to be happy with my emails and other web sites. More than that, I noticed that the fonts displayed on the web are bigger, like it should be according to my settings in Preferences. Surprisingly, I have fixed both of my problems at the same time. Yeah! :D

Now I changed my CFLAGS option back to -O3 and have to remind myself to change it to -O2 before emerging Firefox. That's all :)

---------------------
edited: 17 Apr 2006

Here's some useful information about Mozilla DPI-related Font Size Issues on Unix

Accessing ext2/ext3 File System from Windows

2006-03-25T22:26:00.000+07:00

Although Linux does support read/write files on FAT32 partition, I always format my Windows partition using NTFS, so I ended up having to create a FAT32 partition to share files between Windows and Linux. And that wastes quite a lot of my harddrive space.

However, today I was reading blog archives at Poonlap's Linux Blog and found a very interesting entry about IFS (Installable File System) for Windows. This is just what I have been looking for -- the way to read/write files on Linux (ext2/ext3) partition when I work in Windows without having to shut down Windows and boot into Linux.

Now I am just hoping that some day Linux would fully support writing files on NTFS partition (or maybe WinFS that will come with Windows Vista?) :)

My Desktop

2006-03-25T16:23:00.000+07:00

My Gentoo GNU/Linux desktop running Xfce4, XGL and compiz.

Web Badges/Buttons

2006-03-21T11:49:00.000+07:00

Looking for a nice web badge/button for your site?

There's a tutorial on how to create web badges and a LARGE collection of nice web badges/buttons ready for use at ZwahlenDesign. Check it out :)

updated:
If you need something for your forum signature, try this one: Userbars.com