Trevor Peacock » Java

Finish Term / Linux

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 04:26:24 +0000

Well, long time. Finished assignments, and end of term.
Spent a few days working with tapestry, trying to write a library. Seeing as there’s little documentation it was more or less trial and error, but got it working in the end. have an eclipse environment set up for developing it. Also wrote a tapestry filter to log requests to a file. Should implement it soon, as not all pages are being logged since the installation of new things such as this blog.
Have installed Debian on my main machine, got it dual booting with windows (no hassle), what has been a hassle is getting gaim 1.5, and newer versions of thunderbird and firefox. added this line to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

I manually installed thunderbird from their website, and after changing sources.list thunderbird broke. updated thunderbird from synaptic, and worked fine.

Spent hours trying to get thunderbird working in the first place. I have a thunderbird profile of about 1Gb, which i didn’t want to loose. Ended up having to manually editing prefs.js to update all the paths from my windows setup. After that, and upgrading thunderbird it seems to be working fine, except the fact i am unable to access postoffice.csu.edu.au from this IP address. Its getting rather annoying.

Been going back through the histories music-wise. Found a stack of albums at leading edge, Gene Pitney, Hank Williams, Bee Gees, Carpenters, and Beach Boys. Also found a very nice album from Sydney musician Lior. Very impressed with Gene Pitney, and was already fans of Carpenters and Bee Gees. Also got my hands on Motown Remixed, which I saw advertised in Sain magazine (for Sanity Music). Eleanor and her father are big fans of motown artists, and although i know some of the songs on the album, i don’t know them well enough to compare them to the originals. Also finally got a Jackson 5 album (only took me 2 years), and loving it.

Working hard doing nothing

admin — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 02:00:30 +0000

Been (very) busy the last few days, although I don’t have a lot to show for it. Installed MediaWiki on my Apache server (about my only success). Tried to get WikiPDF working. Its obviously designed to run on Linux. After a bit of tweaking I got it to generate latex, but it failed to convert that to PDF. Tried to get PHP working atop Tomcat. This seemed the most promising lead, and it did work on Tomcat 5.5, but not 4.1, and MySQL didn’t work. Perhaps I should learn how to set up PHP normally, might explain how to get MySQL to work.
Also started a few days ago upgrading tomcat 4.1 to 5.5, all going fairly well, except getting manager and admin modules to work. The Admin module now has to be installed manually, but it doesn’t work on a virtual host, it must be running in the default app.

Continuing to work back through Dream Theaters discography, I’m quite impressed by their 1997 album “Falling Into Infinity”. Quite a relaxing mix of songs, plenty of different styles, every song is unique.

Bass hurts

admin — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 16:09:41 +0000

Highlight of the day: borrowed a bass guitar (one pick-up version) off Dave. Spent a few hours playing today, my fingers feel like they’re going to get blisters. Standard electrics have small strings that tend to cut into your fingers, but the bass has such thick strings, doing bends and slides really burns your fingers, more so than a nylon (from which I have received blisters). Hopefully my fingers will have recovered by morning, and become a little tougher (I haven’t been playing enough guitar lately, my fingers have gone soft).
I was surprised when I saw the bass, its a 5 string, I had forgotten it was (last time I saw it was about a year ago). Bonus!! I have always thought its almost pointless to get a 4 string when you can get a 5, but now I’m not 100% sure, the 5th string gets in the way when playing songs typically played on a 4. On a 4 you can access the E string (or D if you tune it down) with the first two fingers, but the 5th C string gets in the way. Its also very low pitched, its surprisingly hard to play by ear, because the frequencies are so low, there’s only a cycle or less between semitones, I’ll keep practising. Think I’ll have a listen to “The Gathering” and “Pale Forest” tomorrow, and try to play some of that.

Downloaded Apache HTTPD, PHP, and MySQL as separate packages today. We have been using XAMPP for our ITC307 project, but when we put it into production it would be best to use a more compact and controlled distribution. Grace (in another project team) needs a php/mysql system working, so tomorrow we are both going to try and figure out how to manually install the three packages, save us both some time.

Tonight Alan and I tried to get Dark-Reign working over the Internet. Haven’t played it for years, and although I’m not a great fan of it, it would have made a nice change of pace, if it had worked. The problem is probably caused by the fact we are both running dedicated firewalls, config problem there somewhere I expect, anyway, off to bed.

PS. I did find a spell-checking plug-in for firefox, SpellBound works nicely. It can be downloaded from the site, installed, and once run, it will have no dictionary, simply choose download more from the spell check box, and pick one.

PPS. Another interesting thing today:

Requested by Trevor..
Site Feed
Whispers: I don’t really know what this is for…

I dont know how long it has been there. FYI, it allows me to read the blog via my email client (almost as if it was an email), which I can at last. Thanks Katrina.