Month: February 2009

Odd Crash of Opera/Firefox 3.0 on Ubuntu 8.10

eduardofv

For a time my Firefox was crashing and I couldn’t find why or pinpoint which pages made it crash since usually once Firefox was reloaded the pages could be opened. I googled for a while and many reports indicated a problem with the flash plugin and offered several workaround: from reinstalling the adobe plugin to block any flash content. Unfortunately, any of those worked. I got even more puzzled when I started using Opera with similar results. I found a bug report saying that deleting the wins option on /etc/nsswitch.conf may help. Now Firefox seems pretty stable. I’ll try to figure out what’s happening here and post any update here.

 

/etc/nsswitch.conf
------------------
#editado por el supuesto bug de firefox https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.0/+bug/291843
#hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] wins dns mdns4
hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

R language

eduardofv

I’ve just know R and I’m amazed. Looks great and simple to use in our statistical analysis tasks of the new algorithms we’re working on. I’ve briefly used Octave-Matlab, Python with Numpy and plain Ruby with gnuplot, but R might be what I was looking for.

Installing Monodevelop Beta 2 (1.9.2) from sources in Ubuntu 8.10

eduardofv

Log on my experience installing Monodevelop Beta 2 from sources in Ubuntu 8.10 with Mono 2.2 already installed (the bolded steps are the ones that actually worked).

  • Install gtk-sharp 2.8.5 with 
    configure --prefix=/usr

    – FAILED on make from some missing pango, glib depencies 

  • Install mono-addins –prefix=/usr –enable-gui  – OK
  • gtk-sharp 2.8.5 — FAILS just as the previous
  • gnome-sharp-2.20 — Shows some missing gapi-2.0 dependency. Decided try to fix this
  • Install gtk-sharp-2.12.7 (ignoring some missing things) – OK
  • Uninstall monodoc de gdeb – OK (after that I found that was not necessary)
  • Install monodoc 2.0 –prefix=/usr – FAILS to some missing methods. Googling it seems that monodoc in now integrated with mono 2.2 but couldn’t find it. Decided to install monodoc 2.0 from apt-get again
  • Install monodevelop-1.9.2 with ./configure –prefix=`pkg-config –variable=prefix mono` – OK

Accessing a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Server from Ubuntu 8.10 via ODBC / FreeTDS

eduardofv

Update: Check the encoding conversion note for FreeTDS

Following this post I’m detailing the process I’ve done (took me less than 10 minutes):

Set up variables on ~/.bashrc – no se si quedaron bien, las hice como root

 export ODBCINI=/etc/odbc.ini
 export ODBCSYSINI=/etc
 export FREETDSCONF=/etc/freetds/freetds.conf

All of the following can be installed via apt-get:

install unixodbc
install tdsodbc
install unixodbc-dev
install freetds-dev

configure /etc/freetds/freetds.conf (check the client charset section since FreeTDS uses ISO-8859-1 by default and it’s very likely you want to change it (check here ):

[MY_SERVER_NAME]
    host = 192.168.0.YY
    port = 1433
    tds version = 8.0 #Checar si se usan otras versiones: www.freetds.org
    client charset = UTF-8

install sqsh
test with

sqsh -S DB -U user -P pass

configure /etc/odbc.ini

[MY-SERVER-NAME]
Driver        = FreeTDS
Description     = Conexion a Sql  con FreeTDS / ODBC
Trace         = No
Servername    = MY-SERVER-NAME
Database    = MY-DATABASE-NAME

configurar /etc/odbcinst.ini

[MY-SERVER-NAME]
Driver        = FreeTDS
Description     = Conexion a Sql  con FreeTDS / ODBC
Trace         = No
Servername    = MY-SERVER-NAME
Database    = MY-DATABASE-NAME

test

isql DB SA PASS

Trying Heroku

eduardofv

I’m trying Heroku  with the same app that runs this blog.  And it’s great! In no more that 2 hours I get the app up and running with few workarounds needed.

  • I had some problems with the tar.gz used to import. It might because a) SVN files and dirs, which I latetly removed, or b) the tarball created on Windows. But I swittched to the Git import method on Ubuntu and everything uploaded ok.
  • I had Rails 2.1 freezed on vendor/, which after some googling  I found it has to be deleted, and comment the line that searches for a specific version of rails.
  • I also had to remove the freezed version of Ferret and use the one included in Heroku.
  • The only problem which turned to be impossible to solve was the import process of the data. I used the YAML export as described in the documentation but it failed and sent a message to technical support. My db is MySQL so the problem may be there. Let’s see what the guys at Heroku say.