Monday, August 31, 2009

[SW] To make Windows can access Linux's ext2/ext3 filesystem

Here are two software I've found but not tried yet.
It seems that, however, only the Ext2Fsd is open-sourced. Therefore, I think I would try the Ext2Fsd first.

Ref:
ext2IFS vs. ext2FSD : which is better at assessing ext3 in windows?

Sunday, August 30, 2009

[SW] SCIM: How to restart?

Every time we change some settings or install/remove something of the SCIM, it told us to restart the SCIM. But how?

This is a tiny question but has resided in my brain for a long time. After getting the Japanese input method (scim-anthy) back, I faced to this question again. This time, I decide to find the solution, and here it is:

$ sudo pkill -9 scim
$ scim -d

This is my first time to know the pkill command, and it looks useful. Also, I finally know that the ``scim -d'' command is what I was looking for.

[SW] The Japanese input method disappeared from SCIM?!

Hmm... I might do something to cause this happened, but I am not sure. There has been an input method for Japanese in the SCIM of my Ubuntu till yesterday. I found it just disappeared. Even checking the setup of SCIM, I still cannot found the Japanese input method.

I tried to search some relevant items on the internet, and occasionally saw the term ``scim-anthy''. Oh, yes, I recalled that Anthy is the name of the disappeared input method. What needed to do is just install the scim-anthy again:

$ sudo apt-get install scim-anthy

And during the installation, there was no message showed that the scim-anthy has been in my system. So it's possible that I did something to let the scim-anthy disappear? I am just not sure. :-p

Friday, August 28, 2009

[QnA] Fast Dial went empty and Xmarks gave error message

Just two or three days ago, I surprisingly found my entities in the Fast Dial folder became empty. Later, The Xmarks icon set in the button right corner of the Firefox showed an error mark. I tried to update the Xmarks, but it just gave an unknown error message with nothing useful (to me). Knowing nothing to do, I chose one stupid approach: add the entities for the Fast Dial manually.

Why I was stupid? I didn't think about other possibilities. I even didn't think about looking for solutions on the internet!

Maybe I was just too tired after so many works. Today, I sat at the desk with the Firefox connected to the internet, and I think about searching the solution with Google immediately. Oh, there exists smart solution. What I needed to do is to login my Xmarks page and restore the old bookmarks.

Here is the solution: Xmarks, Fast Dial and Firefox 3.5
Step 1: Login into your Xmarks page, then my bookmarks -> Tools -> Explore and restore
Step 2: Delete the empty Fast Dial link in your bookmarks and let Xmarks "synchronize now". Note that you should download the bookmarks from the server, do NOT merge them.

I never know that the Xmarks keeps so many backups of one's bookmarks. That's a pretty consideration for users.

If you need to restore one of your old bookmarks, just click one of the radio button and then View it to see whether you've chosen the one you want.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

[SW] GTK+ Menu Widget

Here is a web page I found. There are two example codes to illustrate two ways to create the menu bar with items.

That web page is written in Chinese, and if you don't read Chinese, here is another web page in English. I believe the English one is the original one and it contains more details in explanation.

The new version tutorial of the Gtk+ menu widget can also been found on the GNOME library website:
http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk-tutorial/stable/c1501.html
You have to go through the following pages to complete that section.

[QnA] Ubuntu update problems...

I've been bothered by the so called ``GPG error'' for some days. There was an error message about the wine, which was installed for the IEs4Linux. My experience of using the IEs4Linux, however, had been not positive, so I decided to remove it as well as the wine package.

After removing the wine, the error message about it was gone, but there are some other errors. Then I searched solutions via Google, and followed several approaches including something like the follows.

$ cd /var/lib/apt
$ sudo apt-get clean
$ sudo mv lists lists.old
$ sudo mkdir -p lists/partial
$ sudo apt-get update
...

Also, I noticed that in the error messages, there are terms about ``hardy-security main'' and ``hardy-security universe'', so I found them in the sources.list and blocked those lines contain the terms. Then, I tried and tried, and finally I restored the old /var/lib/apt/lists and have the following error message:

W: GPG error: http://security.ubuntu.com hardy-security Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG 40976EAF437D05B5 Ubuntu Archive Automatic Signing Key <email address deleted>

I was totally missing in what I was doing because I have weak background in the update issue.

And just several minutes ago, I saw on the internet that someone suggest people who encounters such a problem could change the download server. So I also tried it. At the first try, it didn't work. I noticed a button read ``Select Best Server'' and tried it. Then reload it and problems gone. Actually I don't think I've not really solve the problem yet because I am not sure what I've done. But at least, I've learnt that servers could be related to the updating problems.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

[SW] Regexp substitution in VIM

Vim is my favorite text editor. I use vim for editing plain text or programming. It has many features which I've not been familiar with, and the substitution with regexp is on of them.

I had a little problem in one of my script file, which has been used to chop some data files into shorter segments for further usage. When editing the script, I need to delete some parts which are in the form of ``some digits, some digits''.

For example, I need to delete ``90,185'' or ``1455,2010'' in the script for composing a newer one. Because the digits have different length, my original substituting pattern ``[0-9],[0-9]'' didn't work. I had tried many different regexp patterns as I've known, but no one match my requirement. Then, I think I have to add some more knowledge about the regexp used in vim to improve my skill as well as the work efficiency, so I went to the help of Google and find the following website: Vim Regular Expressions 101.

Finally, I found what I needed. Some quantifiers can be used to set how many times certain part of the pattern should repeat. So my working pattern of regexp become ``[0-9]\+,[0-9]\+''. Learnt something new again. :-)

Monday, August 10, 2009

[QnA] Convert MOD to AVI using transcode

If you happen to have a JVC digital camera and it gives you MOD file, then you might need to convert the file into AVI format.

It's an easy task with the help of transcode:

transcode -i input.MOD -y xvid -o output.avi

Done. Happy. :-)