Technology Tales

Anquet and VirtualBox Shared Folders: Solving Virtual Machine storage issues between Linux and Windows

For a while now, I have had Anquet installed in a virtual machine instance of Windows XP, but it has been throwing errors continuously on start up. Perhaps surprisingly, it only dawned upon me recently what might have been the cause. A bit of fiddling revealed that my storing the mapping data Linux side and sharing it into the VM wasn't helping, and copying it to a VM hard drive set things to rights.

This type of thing can also cause problems when it comes to getting Photoshop to save files using VirtualBox's Shared Folders feature too. Untangling the situation is a multi-layered exercise. On the Linux side, permissions need to be in order and that involves some work with chmod (775 is my usual remedy) and chgrp to open things up to the vboxusers group.

Adding in Windows' foibles when it comes to networked drives and their mapping to drive letters brings extra complexity; any shared folders are made visible to Windows in a path of this form: \\vboxsvr\shared_folder_name\. The solution is either a lot of rebooting, extensive use of the net use command, or both. It induces the sort of going and coming that causes copying things over and back as needed to look less involved and more sensible, if a little more manual than might be liked.

A self-hosted online photo album option

When I was perusing a recent copy of Linux Format, I encountered a feature describing a self-hosted alternative to the likes of Flickr: Gallery. From my quick look, it looks fully featured, offering themes and even shopping cart facilities for those who want to sell their wares. The screenshots on the open-source project's website look promising but, for a fuller appraisal, I would need to spend some time trying to bend it to my will. Before anyone mentions it, I am aware that WordPress can be used for photoblogging, but this tool seems to take things a bit further. It's the sort of thing about which I might have wondered, given the pervasiveness of content management systems these days. My own custom-built photo gallery is devoid of a slick back end, hence why Gallery caught my eye, but I'll continue with it and may even get to adding the needful myself.

Some oddness with table cell display in Opera resolved

A while back, I reported a baffling problem with Opera managing to miss out an entry in the calendar widget on my hillwalking blog. After a bit of fiddling, I managed to track down the problem: setting position:relative in the CSS for hyperlink tags on my theme. While commenting out CSS declarations may seem a low technology way of finding problems like this, it still retains its place, as this little episode proves. Changing it to position:static for the hyperlinked numbers in the table resolved the issue, while I left the defaults as they were in case they had an adverse impact elsewhere.

If all this sounds rather too empirical in its approach, then I can only agree with you, yet a fix is a fix nonetheless. However, display:block is also set for the table entries, which means that may have a part to play too. Regardless of the trial and error feel to the solution, I could not find the problem documented anywhere, so I am sharing it here to help any others who encounter the same sort of weirdness.

From laptop limbo to a new desktop: A weekend restoration of computing order

This weekend, I finally put my home computing displacement behind me. My laptop had become my main PC, with a combination of external hard drives and an Octigen external hard drive enclosure keeping me motoring in laptop limbo. Having had no joy in the realm of PC building, I decided to go down the partially built route and order a bare-bones system from Novatech. That gave me a Foxconn case and motherboard loaded up with an AMD 7850 dual-core CPU and 2 GB of RAM. With the motherboard offering onboard sound and video capability, all that was needed was to add drives. I added no floppy drive but instead installed a SATA DVD Writer (not sure that it was a successful purchase, though, but that can be resolved at my leisure) and the hard drives from the old behemoth that had been serving me until its demise. A session of work on the kitchen table and some toing and froing ensued as I inched my way towards a working system.

Once I had set all the expected hard disks into place, Ubuntu was capable of being summoned to life, with the only impediment being an insistence of scanning the 1 TB Western Digital and getting stuck along the way. Not having the patience, I skipped this at start up and later unmounted the drive to let fsck to do its thing while I got on with other tasks; the hold up had been the presence of VirtualBox disk images on the drive. Speaking of VirtualBox, I needed to scale back the capabilities of Compiz, so things would work as they should. Otherwise, it was a matter of updating various directories with files that had appeared on external drives without making it into their usual storage areas. Windows would never have been so tolerant and, as if to prove the point, I needed to repair an XP installation in one of my virtual machines.

In the instructions that came with the new box, Novatech stated that time was a vital ingredient for a build, and they weren't wrong. While the delivery arrived at 09:30, I later got a shock when I saw the time to be 15:15! However, it was time well spent when I noticed the speed increase on putting ImageMagick through its paces with a Perl script. In time, I might get brave and be tempted to add more memory to get up to 4 GB; the motherboard may only have two slots, but that's not such a problem with my planning on sticking with 32-bit Linux for a while to come. My brief brush with its 64-bit counterpart revealed some roughness that warded me off for a little while longer. For now, I'll leave well alone and allow things to settle down again. Lessons for the future remain, over which I may even mull in another post...

Bumping newly edited older articles in Textpattern

Whether this is intended or not, you can put a pre-existing article to the top of your website's Atom or RSS feed by saving it as draft while it is being modified before restoring its status to live again. This is handy when you have got permanent articles that you are enhancing over the course of time, and you want to give your visitors a reason to return and maybe even prompt search engines too. Though new articles will achieve this always, it's nice to see that older articles don't get lost in space either. While this may be a hack, I am using Textpattern for permanent postings, rather than blogging, so I remain well pleased to see the availability of the feature.

Adding Microsoft core fonts to Debian

When setting up Ubuntu, I usually add in Microsoft's core fonts by installing the msttcorefonts package using either Synaptic or apt-get. Though I am not sure why I didn't try doing the same thing for Debian until now, it's equally feasible. Just pop over to System > Administration > Software Sources and ensure that the check-boxes for the contrib and non-free categories are checked like you see below.

You could also achieve the same end by editing /etc/apt/sources.list and adding the non-free and contrib keywords to make lines look like these before issuing the command apt-get update as root:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny main non-free contrib
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny main non-free contrib

All that you are doing with the manual editing route is performing the same operations that the more friendly front end would do for you anyway. After that, it's a case of going with the installation method of your choice and restarting Firefox or IceWeasel to see the results.

Ridding the Google Toolbar dictionary of erroneously added words

Butterfingeredness can happen to anyone, and it's always nice to know to remove words added to custom dictionaries in error. Many of my blog postings have had their spellings checked using a button on the Google Toolbar, so I have a vested interest in knowing how to remove any bloomers. Thankfully, they have a useful page telling you exactly what you need to do for Firefox and Internet Explorer. As is often said, you can never be too careful...

Take a great leap forward, then consolidate...

While I have been a user of WordPress since late 2006, I only began to start keeping tabs on its development following my hearing news of dramatic changes coming in what became 2.5. Since a pattern developing with more significant changes coming in 2.5 and 2.7 while both 2.6 and 2.8 didn't add too much in the way of upheaval but rather evolved what was already there. With 2.8, theme and widget management got the once over, while there were plenty of other tweaks that polished a well received forbear. The differences between 2.7 and 2.8 are discernible without breaking anything that shouldn't be broken. In short, I rather like the result.

The reaction to 2.5 was mixed, to say the least, and that in part led to the dramatic changes in 2.7, especially regarding the administration interface. Now, I admit to having had doubts about these when I first saw them in development, especially when there was so much chopping and changing during development that stepping back until things settled down became a necessity. Even adding a ticket to the TRAC was problematical, unless you had sight of what was happening behind the scenes, because it became too easy to add an invalid ticket.

With the release of 2.8 into the wild, 2.9 is now on the horizon, and I am inclined to suspect that we might see more considerable changes again. For one thing, there was that interface poll a little while ago, so who knows what impact that may have on what comes next. The structure of the administration screens may not alter that much, but it still leaves changes to colours and icons with the aim of separating navigation from what else is on there, something that doesn't trouble me at all. In fact, I don't see very much wrong with how things are right now, which causes me to wonder if there's any point in making too many changes at all.

The forecasted incorporation of WPMU functionality is a bigger change that would mean the end of WordPress MU as a separate entity, and would concern me more with the amount of under the bonnet re-engineering that would be needed. Add Google Summer of Code projects to this mix and 2.9 looks as if it could be a step change in the spirit of 2.5 and 2.7, if not in feel. Summer 2009 could be very interesting for WordPress, leaving me to hope that it continues to work for me in the way that it does as we move from version to version.

%sysfunc and missing spaces

Recently, I was trying something like this and noted some odd behaviour:

data _null_;
    file fileref;
    put "text %sysfunc(pathname(work)) more text";
run;

This is the kind of thing that I was getting:

text c:\sasworkmore text

In other words, the space after %sysfunc was being ignored and, since I was creating and executing a Windows batch file using SAS 8.2, the command line action wasn't doing what was expected. Though the fix was simple, I reckoned that I'd share what I saw anyway, in case it helped anyone else:

data _null_;
    file fileref;
    x="text %sysfunc(pathname(work))"||" more text";
    put x;
run;

A late "advance" sighting?

Somewhat infuriatingly, Google released its own browser, Chrome, into the wild near the end of last year, though only for Windows. My experiences with it on that platform are that it works smoothly, albeit without many of the bells and whistles that can be got for Firefox. While an unofficial partial port was achieved using Crossover Chromium and there is the Chromium project with all its warnings and the possibility to add a repository for its wares to Ubuntu's software sources, we have been tantalised rather than served so far. However, that was recently bettered by the release of early access versions. In reality, these can be said to be alpha versions so not everything works, but it's still Chrome and without the need for Windows or WINE. The rendering engine, most importantly, seems to be the equal of what you get on Windows, while ancillary functions like bookmark handling seem incomplete. In summary, the currently available deb packages are a work in progress, yet that's better than not having anything at all.