XLAB Tech

Some of us are faced with the fact, that there exist life beyond 7-bit ASCII. (Getting emails with non-US characters in them).

When using Windows 7 64-bit version and Thunderbird, as the last is not Unicode, a person is forced to set “System Locale” to something, that should recognise our special characters.

So here is a twist to the story. By setting System locale to i.e. Slovenian, than the windows do not boot, and there is nothing you can do to make them boot.

By trying to restore the system an annoyed person gets “corrupted System partition”.

At least in my case I could solve the problem by going into the BIOS, and disabling IDE mode on my SATA disc (setting it to AHCI).

If your N900 displays “insufficient power” when you want to charge it from the computer USB port – this is to be done:

when you connect the phone to the computer you have to select “mass storage mode”. After this – your phone should charge without any problem.

When you have a slow “login” on windows 7, here is a helpfull post I found on the net.

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Last week i spend hours trying to fix my malfunctioning windows 7, because it showed me the “welcome” bubble for 20 seconds everytime i logged in/rebooted. So today i got fed up with it, and reinstalled win7.
Closely watching the steps i was making, before the dreaded lag would commence, i found out the cause of the long delay when logging in: The lag is introduced when removing the windows background, and selecting a solid color instead.

You can reproduce this easily by putting a background picture, logging off, logging on, -> login is within 1 sec
Now change background to a solid color, log out, log in -> wait 20+ seconds before you can see the desktop.

Original post:

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7performance/thread/b9e09e89-678a-406c-9f7e-ac2d8919b92e

So you want to send that funny video of your aunt falling down the stairs to all your relatives (who wouldn’t), but the file is over 10, or 20 MegaBytes. Or perhaps you are sending something to people who have a telephone Internet connection that might or might not want to wait 10 minutes to download your one single mail. Or you send a lot of embedded media to your friends who already complain that their Outlook folders are eating their disks (they shouldn’t be using Outlook anyway).

In any case, it is usually a bad idea to send mails with more than, say 5 or 10 megabytes. Instead, web links to the content is usually preferred. In such way, each one can choose whether to download the file or not, it won’t block other more important mails on slow lines, and it will not take a lot of disk space (if they choose not to save them).

But where do you put a silly video you don’t want published on YouTube (or FAIL Blog for what is worth)? Were do you place some illegal stuff that sites often take down?

DropBox is a multi-platform tool that keeps your files in synchronized between your (possibly several) computers and devices. It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, has a web interface, and even an iPhone application. It provides free accounts with a 2Gb limit (though you can take it up to 5Gb by inviting some more people), as well as paid accounts. It was desktop integration, and works really great.

What does DropBox has to do with my mail? Well, DropBox has a “public” folder that permits anyone to access those files (provided you give them the appropriate link). So, you can place your aunt’s video at the DropBox public folder (say, MyDocuments\DropBox\Public\Funny\AuntRollingDown.mpeg), and from your file browser or DropBox’s web interface get the direct link to that file.
You can now simply send that link to everyone you wish to share it with, and that’s it!

When your aunt gets back from the hospital, and threatens you into removing the file, you simply delete it from the public folder, and it won’t be available anymore. (At least not from that link)

Of course, this can be used with other on-line storage providers that let you link to your files without login nor stupid delays.

So, no more excuses, no more silly PowerPoint or any other huge attachments in your mails!
Safe and smart emailing!

I just noticed that all of a sudden no Java program can access network anymore.

After reinstalling a fresh Sun JDK, checking all policies and properties and proxies, none of which helped, I finally managed to ask the all-knowing One the right question.

It’s got to do with premature eja… erm … IPv6 exclusivity.

Checking this and this revealed the source of my woes.

Thus, running

# sudo /sbin/sysctl net.ipv6.bindv6only=0

and changing the setting in /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf fixed the problem.

“Back in the early days of the web there was this wonderful Perl library called CGI.pm , many people only learned Perl because of it.”
— Quote from: http://mojolicious.org/

And so true….

It can happen, that you need to add new hard drive – HDD to your Citrix Xen machine. After installing the hardware, you start searching for appropriate action to be taken in XenCenter and you see, that there is no way to add newly attached HDD as a Local storage device.

You need to do the following:

Let assume, that your disk is recognized by system as /dev/sdb.

1) Find scsi ID as shown:

# ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Oct 22 12:00 scsi-XXXXXXXXX -> ../../sdb

2) Create the SR:
xe sr-create type=lvm content-type=user device-config:device=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-XXXXXXX name-label=”Local Storage D1″

Go to Xencenter – you should see your HDD, and you should be able to create an LVM based SR on that HDD.

http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/

Following the link the programmer will find nice windows perl

People – go grab your copy

As with anything new coming from Google, there has been a lot of expectation regarding the new Google “operating system” for PCs based on the Chrome browser.

Truth is that, as the mobile-devices-oriented Android, ChromeOS can be hardly called an Operating system but rather a Linux distribution.

ChromeOS’s concept is simple; remove absolutely everything from GNU/Linux that is not essential for browsing the internet. That lets ChromeOS boot quickly, in about 10 seconds, a bit more time than of Moblin or the tuned-up version of Fedora by Intel. Google Chrome has still a lot of glitches, but I’m sure they will fix’em all in time for production.

As soon as we boot ChromeOS we are prompted not for a user on the computer but for our Google account and password. On log-on you are presented with your gmail and calendar in the Chrome browser/interface.

There are no programs available in the machine, and you are expected to use Google Docs for office tasks, gtalk for chat, gmail for your mail, or actually any web based application (e.i. meebo or Photoshop Express or Zimba). And that’s pretty much it; you cannot install any additional desktop programs, services, and you are not even supposed to get to the shell)

Another advantage is the low memory usage, since there are almost no services running in the background (except for network, sound, and printing sometime in the future), and the only application running is the browser.

Apart from not being able to install any desktop application, the main problem with ChromeOS is that, at least so far, it’s so cloud-oriented, that your computer will be absolutely useless if you are not connected to the internet.

Now, my desktop computer is connected to the internet all day, no big deal; but why would I cap-down my inexpensive powerful desktop computer with ChromeOS if I can have the Chrome browser together with any desktop application I want?

Of course, ChromeOS is probably oriented to MIDs, UMPCs, nettops, laptops, and other energy efficient devices to have on the go, right? But those are not connected to the internet 24/7, at least not yet.

On the other hand, there are other non-bloated Linux projects to choose from, from DSL and Puppy to Moblin and Ubuntu Mobile, that provide the full desktop experience.

It’s success will be very much connected with the hype Google produces, but we are still to see if it will let Google jump the threads-hold from something that sounds cool to something that actually is, for instance, by allowing the installation of at least ChromeOS applications. For one, when I thought they were reinventing the wheel with Chrome, they did manage to create something different and useful, so we will see if they’ll succeed again or not.

The review ends here, you can stop reading now.

It’s clear that Google, in spite of its “Don’t be evil” motto has decided to spread its tentacles as wide as possible, competing with other open-source like FireFox, Moblin or NASA’s World Wind, and closed-source initiatives like GPS routing or Photo-albums. Intelligently, whenever competing with a strong open-source option Google decided to open the source to their own projects, at least partially (Andriod, Chrome, ChromeOS), but not with other projects. Let’s not forget that you can use Google Earth, Google Maps, Sketch-up and several other pieces of software at home for personal use, but they are still closed-sourced and not free for commercial use, unlike their open-source counterparts.

Thus, by making users dependant on their software, Google can affect open-source initiatives (World Wind, OpenStreetMaps, Blender, etc.). We’ve already seen how Google sent a cease-and-desist letter to avoid a custom Andriod installation from including gmail and other Google applications. With GoogleOS, they have already said that it will not be available for machines with traditional hard disk drives; a completely artificial restriction.