Peter Hoeg» Technical

RedDotRubyConf

Peter — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 05:01:44 +0000

Had a blast at the first ever Ruby conference in Singapore – RedDotRubyConf over the weekend. Awesome job by Andy and Jason and thanks a ton to all the guys from Pivotal Labs, Github, RubyX, Envy Labs, Pragmatic Programmers and of course the main reason were all there – Matz.

RVM problem – ‘rvm-prompt’ returns ‘rvm’

Peter — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 05:02:17 +0000

The amazing RVM was throwing a bit of a tantrum and rvm-prompt was simply returning

rvm

in new shells.

I tried re-installing but no dice.

So after bothering the nice people on IRC as well as on the rvm mailing list, the solution was in the rvm help. When in doubt and seeing odd behavour run

rvm reset

and lo and behold, ‘rvm-prompt’ now works again.

AzTech HomePlugs – HL280E

Peter — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 04:07:59 +0000

I recent added 2 HK280E units to the home network. Getting the new ones (although bought at the same time they still had different firmware) to work with the existing two simply didn’t work. However, upgrading the firmware on all 4 to the same version did the trick so ensure your plugs are all on the same version.

BullZip PDF Printer failing with error 429

Peter — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 12:09:17 +0000

You might encounter an error when trying to print to BullZip PDF Printer:

Run-time error '429':
Error creating object: Bullzip.Dictionary

This happens when the bzdct.dll file is not properly registered which can be quite easy to fix.

Try a simple:
regsvr32 bzdct.dll

If you get an ok message everything is peachy and you should be able to print properly.

However, it has happened that due to permission problems the file isn’t being registered properly (which is why I didn’t work in the first place) and you get an error message to that effect. In that case you need to reset the Windows permissions on the relevant files. You can either to it manually as shown below or use the script found on github.com.

Windows XP
secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\repair\secsetup.inf /db secsetup.sdb /verbose

Windows 7
secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\inf\defltbase.inf /db defltbase.sdb /verbose

RVM & GEM_PATH – things to check if RVM doesn’t play ball

Peter — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 03:55:56 +0000

After having discovered RVM (Ruby enVironment Manager) and realizing how much easier it makes your life (application specific gemsets are pure genuis), I couldn’t get it to work on the desktop while it was fine on the laptop.

gem kept looking in /var/lib/gems/1.8 and it turns out there is quite a few places where GEM_PATH and GEM_HOME are being (or can be) set on your Linux box:

/etc/environment
/etc/security/pam_env.conf
$HOME/.gemrc
$HOME/.bashrc and $HOME/.profile

In my case it was the first 3 and after removing GEM_(PATH|HOME) assignments from those files, RVM started working.

Firefox and incorrectly named plugins

Peter — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:08:41 +0000

As it turns out, firefox on linux will only load plugins if they are named something.so. Hit this error when trying to use the latest 64 bit plugin (10.0.0.18.32) and wanted to keep the older version around with some symlink magic. Basically I had the following files:

libflashplayer.so.10.0.0.22
libflashplayer.so.10.0.0.32
libflashplayer.so -> libflashplayer.so.10.0.0.32

And firefox refused to use the plugins while both konqueror and chromium had no problems with them. Renaming the files (and symlink accordingly) to libflashplayer-10.0.0.32.so did the trick.

Deluge Torrent – a bug report

Peter — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 01:59:05 +0000

Did my duty when it comes to Free software and reported a bug with the deluge torrent project.

http://dev.deluge-torrent.org/ticket/805

PDF::Writer and Ruby on Rails

Peter — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:25:25 +0000

Was struggling with an unbelievably annoying error, where PDF::Writer (or pdf-writer as it’s also called) simply refused to show special accented characters incl the Euro sign, but presented garbage instead. Turns out that as of pdf-writer 1.1.8, the following is the case:

a) No, it doesn’t accept utf-16, despite what it claims
b) Feeding it utf-8, will look fine for what can be mapped to 7bit ASCII
c) Feeding it Win-1252 seems to do the trick, although some people claim it’s also hit and miss.

In your class doing the PDF generation, add a method like this:

def to_pw(text = '')
  return Iconv.conv('win-1252', 'utf-8', text)
end

And then call that to output all the text.

YMMV, but it worked for me.

Fonts in OpenOffice.org

Peter — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 16:01:10 +0000

Started a page on help.ubuntu.com to outline the troubleshooting process when fonts in OpenOffice.org aren’t exactly working properly on Ubuntu.

You can find it here.

Feel free to leave comments here or even better, improve the guide directly on help.ubuntu.com.

Digital TV in Shanghai (DVB-T vs DMB-T/H)

Peter — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:01:49 +0000

While China was doing DVB-T trial in 2006, my understanding is that they have developed their own standard and chosen to go ahead with that instead. The standard, DMB-T/H, is unfortunately incompatible with existing DVB-T equipment which means that my WinTV-HVR1200 which worked flawlessly in Singapore is completely useless in Shanghai.

This wikipedia post seems to indicate that China broadcasts in both standards in Shanghai, although that is definitely not what I have experienced. If anybody can shed some light on the situation, that would be appreciated.