Broken GTK modal windows in Ubuntu 12.04

If you have GTK modal windows broken on Ubuntu 12.04 (assuming they were working properly before), try to deinstall the following packages:


overlay-scrollbar, liboverlay-scrollbar-0.2-0, liboverlay-scrollbar3-0.2-0

After I removed them from my system, I lost that fancy Mac-style scrolling bars, but the modality is working properly again.

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Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to everyone with best wishes!

Traditional Sydney midnight fireworks welcome the new year:

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Running AUSkey with OpenJDK

A short instruction how to make AUSkey working under Ubuntu 12.04 with Firefox browser and OpenJDK:

  • deinstall all icedtea-6-plugin and icedtea-7-plugin:
    sudo apt-get remove icedtea-6-plugin icedtea-7-plugin
  • install OpenJDK 1.7, pkg-config and firefox-dev packages:
    sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk pkg-config firefox-dev
  • get sources for icedtea-web-1.2:
    apt-get source icedtea-7-plugin
  • put the patch into directory icedtea-web-1.2/netx/net/sourceforge/jnlp/runtime then apply it:
    patch < JNLPClassLoader.java.patch

    Please note: the patch JNLPClassLoader.java.patch is in zip archive, you need to unzip it beforehand.

  • return to the directory icedte-web-1.2 and run
    ./configure --with-jdk-home=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64
    please mind to adjust directory above according to the architecture of your PC (it could be i386 or other).

  • then execute
      make
      sudo make install
    

  • put AUSkey resource jars into jre/lib/ext subdirectory of JDK (e.g. /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/jre/lib/ext in my case).
    Please note: if you have these files already installed, you need to remove them if configure fails.
  • and make alternatives for firefox plugin and Web Start utils:
    update-alternatives --install /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so mozilla-javaplugin.so /usr/local/lib/IcedTeaPlugin.so 2012
    update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/javaws javaws /usr/local/bin/javaws 2012
    update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/itweb-settings itweb-settings /usr/local/bin/itweb-settings 2012
    

Now start the Firefox and it has to be working with AUSkey.

Final note: I’ve worked with signed jars received from AUSkey Help desk, if they haven’t updated their Linux distribution yet, please ask these jars from AUSkey Help desk.

I’m not familiar with Java or its security, if this patch makes a breach in web-browser security, let me know.

The idea where to look for the problem and how to fix this issue came from this Thomas Meyer’s post. Thank you, Thomas.



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dpsearch at SLUG

This are the slides for my lightning talk about DataparkSearch Engine I gave at Sydney Linux Group meeting on September 28th this year.

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Issue 44, case 2

A SQL-injection has been discovered in current version of Dataparksearch (see issue 44, case 2, in Russian).

Fix is already made and committed to SVN repository (revision 758), also a new snapshot with this fix is available: dpsearch-4.54-2012-08-27.tar.bz2

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Everglades of Google

Last Saturday I’ve visited Everglades in Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia. In Spring it’s a lovely garden despite foggy and rainy weather.

After the visit I’ve posted a couple videos on Youtube (Google’s video hosting) and some photos in my gallery which specified in my Google Profile.

And after all that Google returns to me all top 10 links in their results about Everglades in Florida, USA. Inspite of I am logged into my Google account, supplied my data to Google (which it obviously has indexed) and sent the request from Sydney, Australia.

Surprisingly, Bing returns the site of the garden on the 3rd place with the site of Everglades Country Club at Woy Woy, NSW, on the 2nd. And apparently it knows nothing about me except my location by IP address.

Ample space to improve for Google in personalisation.

BTW, Yandex is as desperate in Everglades as Google.

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Once more fix for Popularity Contest

When I’ve installed fixed version of the Popularity Contest into an fresh blog based on WP 3.2.1 I get new problem with this plugin on activation, – a fatal error with very short message:


on line: 255

After aplying the following fix the plugin activates correctly:


--- popularity-contest.php.old	2010-09-19 15:39:04.000000000 +0400
+++ popularity-contest.php	2011-08-10 16:43:28.000000000 +0400
@@ -95,6 +95,7 @@
 	if (!is_a($akpc, 'ak_popularity_contest')) {
 		$akpc = new ak_popularity_contest();
 	}
+	akpc_init();
 	$akpc->install();
 	$akpc->upgrade();
 	$akpc->mine_gap_data();

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Why the Empire doesn’t strike back?

It’s widely known Google is bashing Microsoft with free version of on-line office suite, as well Apple with free Android platform. All that is possible due to a huge leverage of contextual advertisement revenue covering Google’s expenses of free software development.

The contextual advertisement is the cash cow of the Google. All other services and software it gives out for free (almost). Sometimes that free make starving cash cows of other companies, like Microsoft and Apple mentioned above.

Thus, Office suite and Windows are money cows of the Microsoft, not the contextual advertisement. Why doesn’t it give out contextual advertisement for free, at least for clients bought their software or for keywords with minimal bids?

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dpsearch-android

Patrick Shirkey (Boosthardware) has developed the native interface to DataparkSearch Engine for Android: code.google.com/p/dpsearch-android

It uses DataparkSearch’s RESTful interface. At first, the idea was to use JSON format for data interchange, but it turned out native JSON parser works slowly in Android. As other parsers were not considered to be included into this project, we created a special search template (strings.htm) which sends “pre-cooked” data to Android client.

Now the main bottleneck is the data interchange itself. Perhaps I need to implement data compression in the RESTful API of DataparkSearch.

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RESTful interface

In the latest snapshot (dpsearch-4.54-15042011.tar.bz2, as well in trunk version in the SVN repository), the search daemon searchd of DataparkSearch Engine has got the RESTful interface, though it support only the GET command at the moment.
Read the rest of this entry »

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