Installing Android-x86 as a guest on Ubuntu on a Dell E6400 using VirtualBox

Its funny how rabbit trails start.

After getting the kids to bed, I browsed my Twitter feed. I saw someone tweet about 10+ free, fast-booting Linux distros that aren't Chrome OS. The list includes Puppy and Jolicloud, both distros I have been meaning to try.

I then started the walk down the rabbit trail. I proceeded to install Puppy as a VirtualBox guest to see just how fast it would boot. I actually am not that impressed with the results, but that’s another story.

As I was playing with Puppy, I remembered that I wanted to play with Android, not only because its a popular topic on the web but also because we have built an Android app at work. Moving further along that trail…

I looked around for an Android ISO that I could load into VirtualBox. I found what I was looking for in LiveAndroid. It is a port for Android on x86 platforms. I downloaded the ISO image, and built up a virtual machine in VirtualBox. I won’t provide any more details of this process because in the end it didn’t work. I couldn’t get the Android UI to recognize the keyboard or mouse, and without inputs you aren’t doing much. It was weird – I could drop into the Linux prompt in the VM and the keyboard worked fine. I poked around a bit, and then found mention in the forums that it is likely an abandoned project, and linked to a different Android port. Continuing down that trail…

I moved on to the active port, called Android-x86. It looked promising, so I downloaded the ISO. I followed the instructions and created an Andriod VM for VirtualBox. In short, I got it running and it works pretty well. I even got the Tendril Android app running.

I just wanted to post to document a few things I had to do:

• Use a good x86 Android distro – Android-x86 works for me
• The VM How-To page doesn’t explicitly mention that you can uncheck the Boot Hard Disk option when creating the VirtualBox VM. If you do this, you will select your ISO image when you boot the image for the first time.
• Instead of worrying about the advanced persistence steps, consider just using the Snapshot feature of VirtualBox to capture the state of your runnning VM. Restore it later to regain state.
• If your graphics are all screwy on boot of the VM, try the VESA menu option in GRUB
• You will need to register on AndAppStore before using the App Store in the image.
• To emulate an SD card (necessary for installing dev Apps), use the simple RAM based emulator. At the GRUB menu, hit TAB, and then on the command line make an entry for “SDCARD=premount”

The other part of it was figuring out the user experience/key bindings. Some hints:

• I couldn’t figure out how to go with just my laptop keyboard. I have a Windows friendly USB keyboard with additional keys that works better.
• Windows key (lower left) – is used to bring you back to the desktop
• Menu key (lower right) – is used to show options within an app
• Arrow keys, enter key – do what you think
• Esc – back button
• After you download an app in the app store, you have to install it. To do this, you drag the upper menu bar down with the mouse+mouse click. This seems really odd, but perhaps makes sense on a mobile device?

Enjoy your free Android!

Technorati Tags: android,virtualbox,ubuntu

Eclipse 3.5 IDE: Generating an Entity Relational ER Diagram for Postgres with AmaterasERD

If you need to generate an ER diagram for a schema, here is how to do it:

One time install

 

Install AmaterasERD on Eclipse 3.5 (must also do AmaterasUML)

• Make sure you have GEF installed
• Download the AmaterasUML plugin JAR file from the project home
• Copy it into your ECLIPSE_HOME/dropins folder (not your plugins folder!)
• Download the AmaterasERD plugin JAR file from the project home
• Copy it into your ECLIPSE_HOME/dropins folder (not your plugins folder!)
• Restart

Generate the Diagram

 

Do this each time you want to render a schema:

• In Eclipse, New->Other->AmaterasERD->ER Diagram
• Give it a name, make sure dialect is PostgreSQL
• Settings:
• JAR file - find the location as directed below
• Driver, URI, User, Password, Schema as directed below
• Make sure there are no spaces after the text in each box. It will foul up the works.
• Click the Load Tables button, you should see a list of your tables
• Make sure to select the tables in the list box! It will only draw the tables that are selected.
• Click Finish
• Right click on your crowded diagram and choose Auto Layout
• Manually finish moving things around to make it readable.
• Export the diagram:
• Right click and choose Save as Image, or
• Right click, Export->HTML

For Reference: PostgreSQL JDBC

 

Above, there were a couple of things you needed to specify for setting up the JDBC.

First, you have to have a JDBC Driver JAR file. If you don’t already have one, you can download one here. Put it in a safe spot on the filesystem, not in a temporary directory. In the JDBC settings dialog, you will need to locate this JAR file.

Second you will need to specify your connection settings. They should be something like for a localhost database:

• Driver: org.postgresql.Driver
• DB: mygreatdb
• URL: jdbc:postgresql:mygreatdb
• User: myschemauser
• Password: rockout
• Schema: public

Changing the Font Size of the Eclipse IDE Project Explorer on a Ubuntu GNOME system

Just a small tidbit for you guys.

I am an Eclipse user, and have been doing just fine with it. However, I just started working on a project that happened to have VERY long Java classnames. This was a problem because I like having the Eclipse Project Explorer on the left hand side of my screen (the default for the Java perspective). But by placing it there, the long classnames would be too wide to read well.

I decided to shrink the font. I used the Eclipse IDE menu Window->Preferences->General->Appearance->Colors and Fonts dialog. I could shrink my Java editor font, but not the Project Explorer font. Eh. Now what.

Google gave me the answer. The Project Explorer font is inherited from the OS font. The downside of this is that you have to change it for your whole OS. The good side is you may want to do this anyway, and just never bothered. :)

Go to System->Preferences->Appearance and click on the Fonts tab. Change the Applications font, which applies to apps like your File Browser and Eclipse.

Done.

I would choose Mr. Fast

I don't run a production website. I don't have a pager that goes off if a site is down. And I am not on the hook for making a website download and render as quickly as possible.

But, if I did, I would hire these guys to help:

WebSiteOptimization.com

Why? Because their own site is mighty fast. It shows they know what they are talking about.

One could argue that they succeed with speed by failing at design. True, the site design is pretty bland. But for a firm that promotes itself as web performance experts, I like that approach.

Why am I talking about this?

I have used a few web performance tools in the past, but learned about a new tool tonight via a tweet. It is called, WebPagetest.org. Tempted, I tried it out and found it useful.

It is a free tool, and is supported with embedded ads. Two ads that appeared while I was using it were for other performance monitoring tools. It made me think to see how well those guys perform on their own sites. A quick gauge of street cred.

Surprisingly, the sites didn't do well. I expanded the experiment, and found that most of the sites of vendors in this space are slow to load. Yikes.

Instead of passing judgment, I will simply pass on the results. The numbers indicate page load time in seconds. The first number is for the first request, and the second number is for a refresh (with the advantages of caching).

• WebsiteOptimization.org .76 / .70
• PassengerPro 2.2 / 2.1 seconds
• Neotys 5.0 / 4.4 seconds
  
• Pingdom results 7.2 / 1.2 seconds
• Soasta results 12.5 / 5.6 seconds
• Gomez results 9.5 / 5.8 seconds
• AlertSite results 10.1 / 7.9 seconds
• Keynote 14.4 / 5.6 seconds
• WebPagetest 2.0 / 1.1 seconds
  

I know who I'd hire.

Problems and Solutions for Installing Wireless Networking for a Canon Pixma MX860 Printer – “Printer is Offline”

This is a solution that I found necessary while installing and configuring wireless networking with my new Canon Pixma MX860 printer.
It should be noted that this printer gets rave reviews, except for its wireless setup instructions. I guess I should be happy to know that I am not alone in my struggles. I concur with the rest though – in my limited experience with it I have found it to be a good appliance. The build quality is especially good.
What I have:

• Windows XP SP3
• Canon Pixma MX860 (purchased July 25, 2009) for something like $160 at Best Buy
• A WIFI hub with WPA2 enabled

What I did right:

• Unloaded the machine from the box, removed all the red tape, installed the cartridges
• Ran through the print head alignment sequence
• Inserted the DVD into my DVD drive
• Chose Easy Install

What I did wrong that probably caused my problem:

• When I got to the screen asking the following, I goofed:
  • 1) Use the printer via USB
  • 2) Use the printer on network
• I made the wrong choice: I picked USB (option 1)  because I had seen other reviews talking about how you should use USB to configure your printer for wireless.
• Instead, you should pick (2) if you plan to use the printer via wireless network, even though you will be using USB to configure the printer. Duh.

I got through the instructions, but couldn’t print documents with the USB cable unplugged. It said the printer was offline.
Final Solution:
My problem was caused by a Windows configuration problem.

• Opened Start Menu –> Printers and Faxes
• Saw the MX860 Printer and MX860 Fax entries in list
• Noted that they were both listed as offline.
• Right clicked on Printer entry, noticed “Use Printer Online” was a menu option, clicked on it
• Voila, printer now shown as online.
• In Notepad, now able to print a document.

Troubleshooting Notes
Just in case this is helpful to anyone else mired in troubleshooting, here are my notes on things I did to figure this out.

Troubleshooting, first idea:

• I launched the Canon IJ Network Tool from the Start Menu with the USB cable plugged in to my computer.
• My printer showed up, so I clicked on it and then Configuration…
• I had to manually configure my wireless
  • Make sure Use WLAN is checked
  • Make sure your SSID is set to your wireless router
  • Encryption is probably WPA2. So choose that. Then click Configuration… for it.
  • If you have a 10 character password, choose 64bit and Hex. Leave ID to 1, and Auth to Auto.
  • Set an Admin password on the second tab if you so desire.
• Click OK, and it should upload those settings to the printer.
• Go to your printer and make sure the settings stuck.
  • Click the Menu button
  • Right arrow key twice (to Settings), OK
  • Right arrow once (to Device Settings), OK
  • Down arrow to LAN Settings, OK
  • Down arrow to WLAN settings list, OK
  • Up arrow until you see your printer IP address
    • Like 192.168.0.83
• Open a DOS prompt on your computer
• ping <your printer ip address>
  • You should be able to get to it from your computer
• But what then? If you unplug the USB cable, I would see that the printer is offline.
• Fail (perhaps, see final solution below, might have been able to fix this)

Troubleshooting, second idea:

• Being the good computer engineer, I uninstalled all the Canon stuff and started over
• This time I picked the right connection choice
• I didn’t need to reconfigure the printer, so I was able to choose “Printer already connected to the network” when it came to that.
• Choose a mapped drive letter for the printer, I left it at Z which is the default.
• Everything seemed to go well, and finished the install.
• Still no joy on printing. The printer was still listed as offline.
• Fail

Hope this helps some other struggling souls out there. Add a comment if so.

Technorati Tags: canon mx860 printer

Book Review: Enterprise Service Bus by David Chappell

Enterprise Service Bus
David Chappell
2004, 352 pages
ISBN-10: 0596006756
ISBN-13: 978-0596006754








This is a review of the best known ESB text from David Chappell.

Main Points

If you don't have a chance to read the book, here are the main points covered on ESB:

• ESB is the next generation of application integration, following the EAI hubs of yesterday.
• ESB is a Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) solution - it creates loosely coupled integrations by enabling integrated applications to simply post messages to the ESB and the ESB handles the rest.
• An ESB is more than just a queue, it can perform sophistacated routing logic to route the messages in different ways based on the contents of the message.
• ESB enables a distributed deployment model - each business unit/office can host their own ESB. Many messages will likely stay within the same ESB instance. Only some messages need to be routed to a different ESB instance.

Review:

Summary: This is a great book for those who know nothing of ESB already. However, if you are already up to speed on the current trends in IT or enterprise software, this book probably won't provide much new material for you. To the credit of David et al, ESB has been mainstream for years now and you probably already know what is inside.

Details: This is a well written book, and something I would recommend for anyone who is unfamiliar with the premise of ESB. It is an O'Reilly book, but one that isn't focused on developers.

Which leads to the main drawback for me - I was expecting more technical depth. If you are a developer, and want to see lots of code samples, this isn't the book for you. This is aimed more at enterprise architects and IT business owners.

Book Review: The TUXEDO System: Software for Constructing and Managing Distributed Business Applications by Andrade et al

The TUXEDO System: Software for Constructing and Managing Distributed Business Applications
Juan M. Andrade, Mark Carges, Terence Dwyer, Stephen Felts


1996, 496 pages
ISBN-10: 0201634937
ISBN-13: 978-0201634938



I regret that I only first read this book just a few months ago. As a long time employee of BEA (owner of Tuxedo), I should have gotten to it much sooner. But, that's how it went for me. I was aware of Tuxedo at a casual level before reading this book. I was also well acquainted with J2EE, which gave me an interesting perspective on this technology.

Main Concepts

This section describes the highlights of the technology. I am going to assume a J2EE frame of reference because that was mine when I read it:

• Tuxedo is a legendary piece of software. Many mission critical applications like real time banking and life critical applications run on Tuxedo. If there are computers deployed in an underground bunker, chances are that they are running Tuxedo. Tuxedo was developed primarily in the 80's and early 90's.
  
• Most of the capabilities of J2EE (developed in the late 90's/early 2000's) are also found in Tuxedo.
• Tuxedo provides platform independence to C programmers. Tuxedo handles network code, portable data structures (buffers), and byte order problems experienced when messaging between different computer architectures.
• The core concept in Tuxedo is that of a service. A service is written and deployed to one of the Tuxedo servers.
• Clients call services via a synchronous or asynchronous Tuxedo API call. The client passed a buffer that contains the parameters. Depending on configuration, the call may pass the transactional context.
• Tuxedo service invocation is internally brokered via message queues. This is the key to its scalability. The queues provide a natural throttling of inbound requests, and can be done without blocking the client (if async is used).

Review

Summary: I highly recommend this book for developers/architects of systems that need to scale. Tuxedo initiated and/or popularized many great ideas for building scalable, fault-tolerant enterprise systems. Even if you won't work with Tuxedo, and plan to use J2EE, it is helpful to understand the history of the technology in which you work.

Details: This is the part where I'd normally nitpick the issues I found with the book. Didn't find any - I think its good!

Book Review: Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web by Thomas Passin

Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web
Thomas Passin
2004 | 304 pages
ISBN: 1932394206
Manning





This is another book review - this time on the topic of Semantic Web.

Main Concepts

This section talks about the main ideas I learned from the book. If you don't have time to read the book, these are the main things:

• The concept of the Semantic Web is to make much of the information on the internet not only human readable, but also available for machines to process efficiently and correctly. If you read this blog, you probably already knew that, so...
• There is a layer cake of technologies that can be used in the solution. This diagram is from Tim Berners-Lee et al, and is presented in the book:

• RDF is clearly a central part of this. The book covers this tech in chapter 2. It essentially is a mechanism for declaring factual statements. It works by mapping two resources with a relationship. Like: "Wrist partof Arm". Wrist is the Subject, partof is the Predicate, and Arm is called the Object.
• Once you have a collection of RDF statements, you can reason on that repository. For example, an insurance company can create a rule "Coverage for any partsof Arm injuries is 93%". When a claim with a Wrist injury arrives, the RDF repository will be used to reason that it it partof an Arm, and therefore the 93% applies.
• An interesting point of applying logic is: you can infer much more in a closed fact repository than in an open repository. Meaning, if you ask the question "Is Joe Smith an employee at ABC Inc?" to the corporate database (a closed repo) you can infer the answer is NO if no record exists for Joe Smith. In an open repository (the internet) the absence of a record means nothing. It can simply mean no one has posted it publicly.
• The semantic web gets really nasty when you consider: 1) some sites will post incorrect information 2) sites will incorrectly annotate their information 3) facts will be posted in different languages. Technologies like RDF will solve some problems, but not all.
• OWL is a language for describing an Ontology - essentially a type structure for resources. OWL can express constraints (a car can only have 4 wheels).
  

Review

Summary: The book I possess was published in 2004. It is unfortunately out of date in many areas, so much so that I wouldn't recommend this book. Otherwise it is well written, and covers the topic pretty well (in the state they were in 2004).

Details: The first chapter motivates the Semantic Web, and the second chapter explains RDF. So far so good. But thereafter, I hit many places where the book just seemed outdated. For example:

• The Annotations chapter discusses the need for users to be able to contribute semantics to web pages they don't control. Several solutions are presented, but the current obvious solution that we have, del.icio.us, isn't mentioned. Tagging is the preferred solution to this problem today, and isn't mentioned at all.
  
• Page 103 makes the statement "Some news sites...allow readers to comment on their stories." Yes, I remember when that was a novelty too, but in 2009 that is the norm.
• The Search chapter, without calling out any specific sentence, seems to describe the world of search as it stood in 2003/4. Oh, well, right. Search has evolved quite a bit since 2004 when the book was written.
  

I am surprised Manning hasn't published an update to this book - Semantic Web seems to be a popular enough topic.

Weeding the Wiki Garden

I just started at my new job about 4 weeks ago. The company has been up and running for almost 5 years, and so there is a lot of history. To be effective in my job, I need to understand the history of the product and the discussions that lead to its current design.

The company wiki seemed like a great place to go.

However, I had trouble making progress. As like with most wikis, it had grown over time and its structure was fragmented. The SocialText blog summarizes it pretty well:

Like any organic process, however, it can be messy. There will be duplicate pages with slightly similar names, links to nonexistent pages, pages that aren't linked to, and so on.

My biggest problem actually was in the number of places where technical information was stashed. I kept bumping into new pages in different spaces in the wiki that contained important information. It was all over the place.

Wiki Gardening Advice

Frustrated, I looked for advice on how to properly perform gardening on a wiki. I had done this before back on the WebLogic Portal wiki, but that was a product I knew well. I wanted to see if there was general guidance for this kind of thing, especially for someone walking into a wiki without a lot of context.

The best document I found was from SocialText in this blog entry: Wiki Gardening Tips

I did everything from that list, plus a couple more:

Deferred Weeding

Instead of removing every page that I felt needed pruning, I tagged some with label "weed". This will allow me to ask a veteran's advice before removing the pages I wasn't sure of.

Two Use Cases: Browse and Search

Be aware of the two main use cases: browsing and searching. Newbies like me will be doing mostly browsing, because we don't know what we need. We need to be able to have a rational navigation structure so we can systematically read pages from the site. On the opposite side are the veterans. Veterans do searches since they know what they are looking for.

This is important to keep in mind when gardening the wiki. When working with a page, it is helpful to know which use case(s) are important. It will help you to decide how to work with it.

For pages that provide basic information, make sure they are easily found in the place people will expect in the navigation hierarchy. For pages that relate to some obscure detail - don't worry too much about where it lives. Those pages are probably only going to be accessed via search.

Book Review: Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 by John Allsopp

Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0
By John Allsopp

• Published: 26th March 2007
• ISBN-10: 1-59059-814-8

This is a review of the book Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 that I read it about 2 months ago.

Main Concepts

This section talks about the main ideas I learned from the book. If you don't have time to read the book, these are the main things:

• Microformats is a technology that supports the concept of semantic web.
• It weaves semantic information into standard presentation HTML. It works by inserting specific keywords into standard attributes like rel and class.
• An HTML page with embedded microformats is viewable just like any other HTML page. However, certain tools can parse the page an extract information such as a person's contact information, an event's date and time, or geographic location.
• Tools can process a microformat enabled page with higher fidelity than simple text parsing. Mashup tools, for example, can extract the information and combine it with information from another source.
  
• There are dozens of available microformats.

Review

Summary: Overall, the writing itself was fine. What I didn't like however was the signal to noise ratio. Meaning, after reading this 300 page book, I felt like I got about 75 pages of value.

Details: I was already somewhat familiar with Microformats before buying this book. Perhaps I was not the target audience.

I was expecting a focused treatment of Microformats, but often found I was distracted by the supporting material, e.g.:

• There are many pages spent on CSS styling of microformats. For example, pages 150-160 are devoted to styling an hCard microformat so that it has rounded corners.
  

This may be ok, if this is what you are looking for. But I was looking for a more focused treatment of the subject.

Book Review: The Definitive Guide to Terracotta: Cluster the JVM for Spring, Hibernate and POJO Scalability by Ari Zilka

The Definitive Guide to Terracotta: Cluster the JVM for Spring, Hibernate and POJO Scalability
By Ari Zilka
By: Terracotta, Inc.
ISBN10: 1-59059-986-1
ISBN13: 978-1-59059-986-0
368 pp.
Published Jun 2008


This is a review of a book a read about 6 weeks ago on Terracotta, the Java clustering technology.


http://www.apress.com/book/view/9781590599860





Main Concepts

This section talks about the main ideas I learned from the book. If you don't have time to read the book, these are the main things:

• Terracotta is a mechanism for sharing objects between multiple JVMs. A managed object is considered the same instance to all JVMs.
• Terracotta works by injecting itself into the JVM classloading hierarchy, and copies objects byte-by-byte to other JVMs as needed.
  
• Terracotta servers can be clustered.
  
• Terracotta provides optional locking semantics around read/updates to these objects. Locks can optionally be held across a cluster of Terracotta servers.
  
• Terracotta can optionally ensure that all JVMs that are using a particular object are kept in sync
• Terracotta can be configured to persist the state of managed objects to disk, such that if all TC nodes fail the state will preserved on restart.
  
• Terracotta is different than a distributed data cache product like Oracle Coherence. Though Terracotta can be used for distributed caching, its focus is a bit different.

Review

Summary: This book is worth buying, assuming you are a Java developer like me. I found the coverage to be solid, and the technology itself is interesting.

Details: As stated, I felt that it is a good technical book, and worth your time. But, it isn't flawless. I had issues with the quality of writing.

First, a quick aside. I feel that compared to other engineers, I am a pretty good technical writer. I have seen some awful wiki pages in my time, and feel that I usually do better than most. However, I know my limitations. I have written various documentation chapters and whitepapers in my time that were reviewed by technical writers. These always come back to me with heavy edits, and each time I am disappointed to find out that I am not that good when compared to professional technical writers. Technical writing is a discipline, and it isn't easy.

The reason I bring this up is that I found this book hard to follow at times. I found the language to be loose - in a lot of places the text was not concise enough for my taste. To be clear, it wasn't horrible. It actually felt like something I would write. Which is to say, pretty good for an engineer, but a professional tech writer would have done better. Given that books are published much like software, I assume this was due to impossible deadlines and lack of manpower.

In summary, the quality is tolerable, but there is room for improvement. Also, I submitted a number of errata to the Apress site, but as of 6 weeks later they seem to have been ignored. I was told to expect a follow up email from the author, but no luck.

Tutorial: How to Install the Linux Standalone Flashplayer on Ubuntu 9.0.4

This entry explains how to install Adobe Flashplayer on a Ubuntu 9.0.4 system. We will start with a possible use case that brought you here.

A Use Case: You are Running a Maven build that uses FlexMojos

FlexMojos requires the standalone Flashplayer (not the Firefox plugin). If you don't install it, you will get an error like:

java.lang.NullPointerException
       at org.sonatype.flexmojos.test.threads.AsVmLauncher.stop(AsVmLauncher.java:181)

Well, that exact error message will change at some point because it was logged as a bug. What it means is that you don't have the flashplayer installed.

Installing the Standalone Linux Flashplayer

Instructions:

• Go specifically to THIS page at adobe. Don't follow the regular "Get Flash Player" link because it will think you just want the plugin.
• Look for the link for the "Linux Standalone Player" download
• Download and save to your hard drive. In there, navigate to /standalone/release and extract the binary. Put it in /usr/bin
  • tar -xvf flashplayer_xxx.tar.gz
  • sudo cp flashplayer /usr/bin/flashplayer
• Restart your shell, and make sure you can access it: $ flashplayer
• Bash out with your Flash out.

Tutorial: How To Install Postgres on Ubuntu

The Ubuntu Synaptic package manager will help you here. Make sure you install these two packages:

• postgresql
• pgAdmin 3

After install, you will need to change the default password for the postgres user.

• sudo -u postgres psql postgres
• \password postgres
• Provide your password of choice

Now, launch the pgAdmin console via the menu Applications -> Programming -> pgAdmin 3. Log in using these values:

• localhost
• user: postgres
• password you just set

Create a non-Admin user (aka login role):

• Right click on Login Roles in the tree, select New Login Role...
• Name: myuser
• Password: mypassword
• If needed, check the box for Superuser privs, Create... privs

Finally, to allow the build to operate without prompting for passwords, you need to:

• Open the file ~/.pgpass for edit (or create, if doesn't exist)
• Add this line:
  • localhost:5432:*:myuser:mypassword

You should be able to use Postgres like a champ now. You can now login with the new user using pgAdmin

Tutorial: Configuring Subversion 1.6.2 on Ubuntu 9.0.4 with Eclipse 3.4

Having a problem with SVN commands not working? Let me guess, you have:

• Ubuntu 9.0.4
• Eclipse 3.4
• Subclipse
• and you need to connect to a Subversion 1.6.2 repository
  

If you are using the latest Subclipse plugin to checkout your projects, it will be working as a SVN 1.6.x client. This means it will write 1.6.2 file structures to disk.

Now you want to use a command line to do SVN commands. That means you need the 1.6.x command line client. BUT, if you do a "sudo apt-get subversion" it currently gives you....wait for it....version 1.5.4 for you command line. And you cannot use a 1.5.x client on a branch that also uses a 1.6.x client.

So, you have to do the following workaround to get command line version 1.6.x

• Download the 1.6.2 RPM from http://www.open.collab.net/downloads/subversion/redhat.html
• sudo apt-get install alien
• sudo alien CollabNetSubversion-client-1.6.2-1.i386.rpm
• sudo dpkg -i collabnetsubversion-client_1.6.2-2_i386.deb
• This installs 1.6.2 into /opt/CollabNet/bin
• Now, fix up your PATH env to make sure it is using 1.6.2 ("which svn")

Tutorial: Solution for configuring OpenVPN on Ubuntu 9.0.4 with a pkcs12 key. .p12 #PKCS12

Configuring OpenVPN on Ubuntu if you've been given a .pkcs12 file is not a joyride (at least, as of Ubuntu 9.04). Currently, Ubuntu's network manager does not recognize #PKCS12.

This blog entry assumes your IT department has provided:

• Your #PKCS12 file, possibly suffixed with .p12. E.g. "username.p12"
  
• Your password for the VPN
• An .ovpn file, which is a text file that contains your VPN configuration
  

So, here is what you need to do:

• First, make sure you have the OpenVPN stuff installed:
  • Launch the package manager: System->Admin->Synaptic Pkg Mgr
  • Make sure you install (or have already) "openvpn" and "network-manager-openvpn"
  • Probably need to reboot at this point
• Second, you will need to break the pkcs12 key you were given into three seperate files: .pem, .crt, .key
  • See this blog entry as the source of this next part
  • Open a terminal window and navigate to the folder where you download the .p12 file IT gave you
  • Execute the following commands, using the key password IT gave you whenever one is asked for
  • openssl pkcs12 -in username.p12 -out username.pem
  • openssl pkcs12 -in username.p12 -out username.crt -clcerts -nokeys
  • openssl pkcs12 -in username.p12 -out username.key -nocerts
• Third, launch the VPN connection configurator in the network manager
  • Click on the 4-bars network icon in the upper right of your screen
• Fourth, specify the following in the dialog
  • VPN Connections -> Import....
  • Find your .ovpn file
    
  • User Cert: (your .crt file)
  • CA Cert: (your .pem file)
  • Private Key: (your .key file)
  • Password: (that password IT gave you)
• Finally, you should be ready to go
  • Click on old 4-bars, and choose your VPN.
  • Hope that it connects, cause otherwise I don't know what to tell you.

OnTechnology

What, a new blog?

OK, Peter, you haven't done an outstanding job of updating your existing blog. Why create a SECOND blog?

Its a different audience.

In the past year, I have spent a lot of time doing developer projects. Like my JSF whitepaper for Oracle. And all of my Collaborate 2009 presentations. Etc.

But you probably don't know about them because I never blogged about them on my OnDemand blog. Why? Because that blog's audience is probably focused on Cloud Computing and SaaS, and not Java server development. I didn't what to cross the streams, so to speak, so I just never blogged about other technical topics.

But I would like to blog about technical topics NOT related to Cloud. Thus this new OnTechnology blog. This blog will not attempt to create a coherent set of entries - I expect it to be rather random. Like - "Here's how to setup printing on Ubuntu". Or, "I just read this Semantic Web book, this is what I think..." I don't expect many people to subscribe - I think the main consumer will be the Google Search Engine, and people who waltz in from there.

Here it goes...