Lukav’s Weblog

Since I’ve switch to Kubuntu I’ve been using Kopete as an Instant Messaging client. I’ve wanted to test Pidgin, but I didn’t want to lose my history again. Unfortunatelly I couldn’t find a tool to transfer my history from Kopete to Pidgin, so I’ve write a little script to do the job.

So here is it:

history_import_kopete2pidgin.tar.gz

In order to use it you need to install xalan and then just run the script with your user.

The script was written for my Timezone, so it might be necessary to edit  history_import_kopete2pidgin_filename.xslt file and enter yours

Hope this is useful for someone

Over the year I had to compile and install several times hpt374 driver for the HighPoint IDE controller.

Although the hardware is very old and probably nobody use it anymore I decide to put down this howto, for anyone interested.

The last time we’ve upgraded debian to etch with kernel 2.6.18-6-686 so the instruction will assume this kernel version.

First install the kernel-headers package

apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.18-6-686

then download the driver in this case hpt374-opensource-v2.17-1114
extract to some folder, for example: /usr/src/hpt374-2.6.18-6-686/

compile the driver

make KERNELDIR=/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.18-6-686

you should now have hpt374.ko. Copy this file in the kernel modules directory

cp hpt374.ko /lib/modules/2.6.18-6-686/kernel/drivers/ide/pci/

We need to populate the modules dependencies

depmod -r 2.6.18-6-686

add hpt374 to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules if it is not already there

echo hpt374 >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules

update the initrd image so the module gets loaded on system start up

update-initramfs -u -k 2.6.18-6-686

And thats it. You should now be able to reboot and use the new kernel with the raid

P.S. I’ve wrote this in a hurry, so I’ve may missed something.

The latest discovery on IE problems was that when you use float divs and you decide to print IE, either ignore the floats or to be more precise, if you don’t explicitly specify width it just expands them to 100%.

There are some posts on the network, but all of then suggest to not use float when printing. However this was no good for me, cause I arranged me forms with css and no tables. The solution of fixing the with of floats was also no good, since I have different internationalization and some text differ in length.

So since I couldn’t find any css solution I had to make a simple JS hack.

In turns out IE has to useful events - onbeforeprint and onafterprint. So I just used those to go over all my floating elements and set the width before printing:

// We try to fix printing styles because IE is has problems
if (OAT.Browser.isIE) {
 OAT.Event.attach(window,"beforeprint",function() {
 	var elm = IB.PageContent.getElementsByTagName('div');
 	for (var i=0;i<elm.length;i++)
 		if (OAT.Dom.isClass(elm[i],’right’) || OAT.Dom.isClass(elm[i],’left’)) {
 			var size = OAT.Dom.getWH(elm[i]);
 			elm[i].style.width = size[0] + ‘px’;
 		}
 	}
 });
}

The example uses the OAT library, but you can guess what it does.

This fix works fine with the little exception that the divs move a little before print, but I can live with this for now.

Well, it seams my blog isn’t doing so well, since I didn’t get an invitation. However http://joost-invite.blogspot.com/ ware nice enough to send me one. Thank you very much.

So as I suspected the guys have done a pretty good job. Joost has a nice, simple and elegant interface, whitout the fuss of tons of options. I can describe it as “only what you need” interface, which are becoming widely used. It has some flaws, but they are more because of my preferences not of stupidity. I have to say the interface is pretty good. I’m almost jealous :).

As far as performance goes, I run it on my laptop hp nw8000 1.7 Mhz Intel Pentium with 1GB Ram. And it runs pretty smooth. There are some vary VARY small and rare delays, but I still can not determine if it is my PC speed or because of my ISP speed.

One thing that is missing are subtitles. People would like to have subtitles as with Divx movies. But this could be added pretty easily, I think. Someone can make a plugging that would allow playing user subtitles. That way the community could take care for the translation, timing and so on, where the content providers would continue to produce the main content. The translators can be rated, so the other users are able to choose the best translation from all.

As overall, so far I’m quite impressed and see great potential in this. For example: if anyone can become a content provider, young talents would be able to produce a program or movie, present it to a wide audience and collect the benefit without the stopper in the big networks chains.

Not to mention that it is quite nice to choose what you want to watch and to be able top pause at anytime.

Uraaa, no more waiting for the commercials to go to the bathroom

Keep with the goos work guys.

P.S. If anyone wants an invitaion, post a comment.

Hi all,

Today my colleague and partner turned my attention to the next service from the founders of Skype called Joost. It sounds very interesting and shows how “the network” is slowly overtaking the “the networks”. By this I mean that each day I find that people are using the Internet for staff that they thought are only available by other means. For example before 7-8 years the source for reliable information was the newspaper or TV. Today the Internet Network is not considered less reliable source and is perfectly normal to say “I found on the net” or “I read in the Internet”.

I see the future where TV, video and radio are only both for convenience not for necessity. If my parents bought а TV so they can stay informed and up to date - they spare the money on computer because ‘their boy (me)” was interest in that new thing. IMO lets say in 5 years time parents will buy a computer so they can stay up to date - Watch TV, read articles and books listen to the radio etc and would buy a TV just to make it more easy and to get the kid off the PC.

So the revolution that started 10 years ago have not yet finished and there are things yet to see and come.

I’m very excited to try out joost, but I need someone to send me invitation. So if you read this and you have one please PLEASE send it to me.

If I actually get one by this blog, then my blog is not doing so bad

There is a very interesting service out there:

http://browsershots.org/

It makes a screenshot of a page with various browsers like: Dillo 0.8, Epiphany 2.14, Epiphany 2.16, Firebird 0.6, Firebird 0.7, Firefox 1.0, Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0, Flock 0.7, Galeon 2.0, Iceweasel 2.0, Konqueror 3.5, Mozilla 1.0, Mozilla 1.1, Mozilla 1.2, Mozilla 1.3, Mozilla 1.4, Mozilla 1.5, Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7, Navigator 4.8, Opera 9.2, Opera 9.10, Phoenix 0.1, Phoenix 0.2, Phoenix 0.3, Phoenix 0.4, Phoenix 0.5, SeaMonkey 1.0, SeaMonkey 1.1, Windows MSIE 5.0, MSIE 5.5, MSIE 6.0, MSIE 7.0.

Great idea and a vary usefull one.

I’ve test it with my blog you can have a look here:http://browsershots.org/website/http://lukav.com/wordpress/

Hi, I’ve been using a Virtual machine for some time now to test with IE6 (Microsoft Internet Explorer) and IE7. However this machine was taking valuable resources just to have IE6 running, which was very inefficient. So I’ve look for another solution and found it.

http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

Thank you. THANK you vary VARY much. TredoSoft.

They made an installer that installs IE versions: 3.0, 4.01, 5.01, 5.5 and 6.0 (by the time of this writing) on a single PC as a standalone app.

So far it works like a charm.

For those of you that have discovered that when you have Firebug installed and are developing some synchronous XMLHttpRequest everything works, and when you disable it it stops: here is the problem.

Believe it or not it is a bug in Firefox NOT in Firebug. It turns out that Firefox doesn’t call onreadystatechange when the you set the 3 parameter (async) to false in open. Probably FF expects that when a call is synchronous the developer will process the result in the lines following the send call. May be this make sense, but if you want to quickly test async/sync calls or use a library that doesn’t take care of this, you be in trouble.

I can say for certain (I’ve committed the code myself) that the next release of OpenLink AJAX Toolkit won’t have this problem and will make no difference if you have Firebug or not.

I use the following to catch the situation where Firebug is not installed or is installed but disabled:

  try{
    if(OAT.Dom.isGecko() && !xhr.options.async && xhr.obj.onreadystatechange == null)
      OAT.AJAX.response(xhr);
  }catch (e){}

OAT.Dom.isGecko() - return true if it mozilla and derivatives
OAT.AJAX.response - is the function that is normally called when the request finish.
xhr.options.async - is holding if the call is async or not
xhr.obj.onreadystatechange - is the original Firefox XMLHttpRequest object instance, since the code above works in the context of OAT

Today I had to make an AJAX application iSPARQL compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer, at same point we decided to not support it, but now we realized that some small part of it can be supported. We don’t supported because IE doesn’t support embedded SVG… Anyway…

I’ve spend several hours trying to catch some errors of the sort: “object expected” or “object doesn’t support this method or property”. Have you seen those? Yes, the once that doesn’t give a clue which is the object and the lines usually has nothing to do with the reality. So finally I’ve decided to find a JS debugger that would tell me at least where the problem is. I didn’t have much hope, because I’ve spend time to search before and didn’t find anything to my taste that did the job, until I found this: MSE - Microsoft Script Editor

Thank you Erik for the wonderfull post.

It turns out Microsoft has a debug for their free browser in their payed Office package. Funny isn’t it. It turns out that developers that want to easy their life when writing JS for IE has to purchase at least MS Office.

It is not perfect, or even good, but it is the best I have seam so far and at least you get to actually see the row where the error occured or even execute step by step.

Anyway here is what Erik have posted (on my installation - Office 2003 Professional the exe was called MSE7.EXE):

MSE - Microsoft Script Editor

Microsoft Script Editor is probably one of the lesser known tools that can really make a difference when it comes to developing web applications. MSE is a debugger, much like Visual Studio and it comes bundled with Microsoft Office. It should not be mistaken for Microsoft Script Debugger which is a piece of crap compared to MSE. MSE got all the nice features Visual Studio has without the bloat.

MSE is installed at %ProgramFiles%/Microsoft Office/OFFICE11/MSE7.exe. Older versions might be installed at a slightly different location and if you cannot find it just search for mse. If you still cannot find it and you have an old Microsoft Office CD lying around you can install it from there. If you select custom install or add remove components it should be located under Microsoft Office / Office Tools / HTML Tools /Web Scripting / Web Debugging.

By default script debugging is disabled in IE but you can enable it by
unchecking Tools / Internet Options... / Advanced / Disable script
debugging (Internet Explorer).

So how do you use this mysterious tool? MSE allows you to debug exisiting IE processes but more importantly it is triggered by the debugger statement (which by the way also works if you have Venkman opened for Mozilla). If you already have IE up and running or you can’t edit the source files of the web application you can get into the debug mode by opening the Debug / Processes dialog and from there select the process to attach to.

Once in debugg mode you can step through the program to see what is going on. Out of the box not much is shown but things like local variables, watch, running documents, call stack and more is available to you under Debug / Window.