Technology Tales

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.

Out of memory at line: 56

This is an error that I have started to see a lot in the last few weeks. First, it was with Piwik and latterly with WordPress.com Stats. For the record, I have never seen it on up-to-date systems but always with IE6 and at page unloading time. The CPU usage hits 100% before the error is produced, which had me blaming JavaScript in error. However, it isn't the cause of all ills.

In fact, the cause seems to be a bug in a certain release of Adobe Flash 9, but I reckon that the inclusion of certain features in a Flash movie are needed to trigger it too. While I don't have the exact details of this, WordPress.com Stats worked without fault until a recent update, so that is what is making me reach the conclusion that I have. That observation also makes me wonder whether we are coming to a point where Flash compatibility is something that needs to be factored into the use of the said technology in a website or web application. Updating Flash will solve the problem on the client, but it might be better if it wasn't triggered on the server side either.

Navigating plugin compatibility issues on 64-Bit Ubuntu 9.04

My laptop has both Windows Vista and Ubuntu on there, with WUBI being the facilitator of the peaceful coexistence. However, what I either forgot or never realised was that it was the 64-bit variant of Ubuntu 9.04 that has found its way onto the thing. For the most part, it works well, but there is one catch that I recently encountered: not every Firefox plugin or add-on is 64-bit compatible.

Google Gears is one such example, yet other very useful and pervasive helpers have the same affliction: RealPlayer is one, and Adobe's Flash is another. Apparently, you can still download the 32-bit release versions and use nspluginwrapper to get them going. That worked for RealPlayer, but seemingly not for Flash; more investigation may be needed on that one.

Other remedies like using 32-bit Firefox (if it runs, of course) or alpha versions of what Adobe offers can be tried too. It almost goes without saying that I'd wish that there was more awareness of the 64-bit Linux world, but I remain glad to have met this rough edge before taking the plunge with my main system.

Update 2014-01-24: It looks as if this problem has gone away now with the growth in maturity of 64-bit computing. Certainly, it does not rear its head on any 64-bit Linux distro that I have used or even Windows, apart perhaps from ensuring that you are using the right JRE for a browser (32-bit or 64-bit).

Understanding Perl binding operators for pattern matching

While this piece is as much an aide de memoire for myself as anything else, putting it here seems worthwhile if it answers questions for others. The binding operators, =~ or !~, come in handy when you are framing conditional statements in Perl using Regular Expressions, for example, testing whether x =~ /\d+/ or not. The =~ variant is also used for changing strings using the s/[pattern1]/[pattern2]/ regular expression construct (here, s stands for "substitute"). What has brought this to mind is that I wanted to ensure that something was done for strings that did not contain a certain pattern, and that's where the !~ binding operator came in useful; ^~ might have come to mind for some reason, but it wasn't what I needed.

Is a spot of bother with computer self-building a case of the reverse Midas touch?

Last week, a power outage put my main home PC out of action. While it may have been recoverable if that silly accident of a few weeks back hadn't happened, a troubled rebuild is progressing. Despite the challenges, I somehow manage to remain hopeful that an avenue of exploration will yield some fruit. Even so, thoughts of throwing in the towel and calling in professionals rather than throwing good money after bad are gathering. The saga is causing me to question the sense of self building in place of buying something ready built. Saying that, they can have their off days too.

Meanwhile, I have been displaced onto the spare desktop PC and the laptop. In other words, my home computing needs are being fulfilled to a point, though the feeling of frustrated displacement and partial disconnection from my data remains; because I have been able to extricate most of my digital photos and my web building, things are far from being hopeless. With every disappointment, there remains an opportunity or two. Since the spare desktop runs Debian, I have been spending some time seeing if I can bend that to my will, which can be done, sometimes after a fashion.

A few posts should result from this period, not least regarding working with Debian. On the subject of hardware, I will not elaborate until the matter comes to a more permanent resolution. From past attempts (all were successful in the end), I know that the business of PC building can feel like a dark art: you are left there wondering why none of your efforts summon a working system to life work until it all comes together in the blink of an eye leaving you to wonder why all the effort was expended. The best analogy that I can offer is awaiting a bus or train; it often seems that the waiting takes longer than the journey. Restoring my home computing to what it was before is a mere triviality compared to what some people have to suffer, but resolution of a problem always puts a spring in my step.

Old tricks can still save money: When reseating a sound card makes a lot of sense

Recently, there was no sound coming out from my main PC and I began to suspect the sound card, an ageing Guillemot Maxi Sound Muse. Naturally, my thoughts turned to making a new acquisition, only for those in stock at PC World seemed to have unknown or dubious Linux compatibility. However, I powered the machine down for the night and re-seated the card in its slot the following morning. That was enough to solve the problem and I retained my cash, never a bad thing and especially so in these times. It's always nice to know that and old trick still has its place.

Getting Fedora working in VirtualBox

After a hiatus induced by disk errors seen on start up, I have gone having a go with Fedora again. In the world of real PC's, its place has been taken by Debian, so virtualisation was brought into play for my most recent explorations. I could have gone with 10, the current stable version, but curiosity got the better of me and I downloaded a pre-release version of 11 instead.

On my way to getting that instated, I encountered two issues. The first of these was boot failure with the message like this:

FATAL: INT18: BOOT FAILURE

As it turned out, that was easily sorted. I was performing the installation from a DVD image mounted as if it were a real DVD, and laziness or some other similar reason had me rebooting with it still mounted. Though there is an option to load the hard disk variant, it wasn't happening, resulting in the message that's above. A complete shutdown and replacement of the virtual DVD with a real one set matters to rights.

The next trick was to get Guest Additions added, but Fedora's 2.6.29 was not what VirtualBox was expecting, and it demanded the same ransom as Debian: gcc, make and kernel header files. Unfamiliarity had me firing up Fedora's software installation software, only to find that Synaptic seems to beat it hands down in the search department. Turning to Google dredged up the following command to be executed, which got me further:

yum install binutils gcc make patch libgomp glibc-headers glibc-devel kernel-headers kernel-devel

However, the installed kernel headers didn't match the kernel, but a reboot fixed that once the kernel was updated. Then, the Guest Additions installed themselves as intended, with necessary compilations to match the installed kernel.

The procedures that I have described here would, it seems, work for Fedora 10; well, they certainly have bequeathed me a working system. I have had a little poke and a beta of Firefox 3.5 is included, and I saw sign of OpenOffice 3.1 too. So, it looks very cutting edge, easily so in comparison with Ubuntu and Debian. Apart from one or niggles, it seems to run smoothly too. Firstly, don't use the command shutdown -h now to close the thing down, or you'll cause VirtualBox to choke. Using the usual means ensures that all goes well, though. The other irritation is that it doesn't connect to the network without a poke from me. Whether SELinux is to blame for this or not, I cannot tell, but it might be something for consideration by the powers than be. That these are the sorts of things that I have noticed should be telling you that I have no major cause for complaint. While I have mulled over a move to Fedora in the past and that option remains as strong as ever, Ubuntu is not forcing me to look at an alternative and the fact that I know how to achieve what I need is resulting in inertia anyway.