dev. » helpdesk

How to repair the Apple iCal

niels — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 20:02:16 +0000

My iCal kept crashing constantly due to a segmentation fault (EXC_BAD_ACCESS, SIGSEGV). In the short time right before it crashed, I noticed that iCal tried to sync with a corrupt external calendar. The bad data got into iCal once, and iCal didn’t stand it
If you happen to meet a failing iCal one day, and you can’t remove the mischief from within iCal, you have two options:

get the decent Purity app, unplug the network (so that iCal won’t sync before the culprit has been removed), and clean the iCal cache
have a closer look at ~/Library/Calendars/, where all the calendars are stored. Inspect the info.plist files and .ics event data to find the bad calendar and move its folder to another location. Restart iCal. If it is still crashing you got the wrong calendar – put the moved calendar back and keep on searching.

No. 2 did the trick for me.
Plain text files and simple folder layouts might not look as evolved as SQL tables and mysterious binary data files – but they work just fine in this scenario and are pretty easy to debug.

Adjusting Brightness on a Samsung NC10 Running (K)Ubuntu

niels — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:53:34 +0000

The hardware keys for adjusting brightness on a Samsung NC10 aren’t working in an out-of-the-box Kubuntu 10.04. The brightness slider in the Power Management tray application isn’t working as designed as well.

Fortunately, you can set the display brightness using the hardware keys in GRUB, the bootloader that let’s you choose what OS and/or Kernel you want to start.

Settings are lost on reboot, and you still can’t change the brightness at runtime, but it’s better than nothing.

Update:
Actually, there is a way to enable the brightness keys. And you don’t even have to edit your X.org conf manually. Just head over to ubuntu-tweak.com and install samsung-brightness

Entering Foreign Characters in Firefox

niels — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:11:08 +0000

When dealing with foreign names, it is a matter of both correctness and courtesy to use the right spelling. But quite often it is also a problem of “how do I enter this darn character”.

Luckily, there is abcTajpu, a Firefox extension that allows you to select foreign characters, umlauts, … quite easily.

Free, no ads – really worth a try

How to install Ubuntu 10.04 on a Netbook with Full Disk Encryption

niels — Sun, 02 May 2010 12:55:00 +0000

Installing Ubuntu on a netbook is trivial. Installing Ubuntu/Kubuntu with full disk encryption is absolutely easy. Unfortunately, installing it on a netbook with full disk encryption is not (at least not without a CD-ROM drive).

First of all, the desktop Ubuntu and Kubuntu install images don’t support full disk encryption. So get the Alternate ISO from here (Kubuntu users this way, please). Then create a bootable USB drive using UNetbootin.

Ready? Then boot your netbook from the USB drive, and proceed with the installation using this guide. You will be able to select your country, keyboard and configure your network. Then the installation will fail, because the installer won’t find a CD-ROM drive. Yuck.

Okay, if there is no CD-ROM drive we just have to mount the installer ISO. For this we copy the alternate installer ISO to a second USB stick, plug it into the netbook and give the system a few seconds to recognize it. Then we use alt+F2 to switch to a command line and hit so we can enter commands. First, we should make sure that both USB drives are there:

ls -la /dev/sd*

should return something like this:

/dev/sda
/dev/sda1
/dev/sda2
/dev/sdb
/dev/sdc

/dev/sda is your hard disk, /dev/sdb is the USB drive you booted from, and /dev/sdc is the second USB drive containing the installer ISO file (unless you have a second hard drive). Now you can mount the second USB drive to /mnt and the ISO image to /cdrom:

mount -t vfat /dev/sdc /mnt
mount /mnt/ubuntu-10.04-alternate-i386.iso /cdrom/
exit

Next, hit alt+f1 to return to the install menu and select “Detect CD-ROM”. The installation will proceed as described in the blog post above.

Have fun with Ubuntu 10.04!

View and Kill Processes using the Windows Command Line

niels — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:49:59 +0000

It’s pretty convenient to list and kill processes using ps and kill / pkill on *nix. Actually, you can do that on a Windows command line as well:

tasklist: shows a list of all running processes
taskkill: kills processes

Among other options, processes can be killed by their process ID (taskkill /PID 4711) and by the name of their executable (taskkill /IM firefox.exe).
So, if you have perl scripts running wild, just execute taskkill perl.exe to kill all of them down with a single command.

More lesser known Windows commands are described in this PDF.

Opening ISO Images in Windows

niels — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 08:41:34 +0000

Some tools just keep amazing me. They are flexible, stable, small – basically, they just work. One of these tools is 7-Zip.
It does a lot more than just creating 7zip archives: it is able to create and open almost any package type I’ve run across so far. And it even reads .iso image files.
Thanks a lot for this marvelous tool – it’s a joy to use and a definitive must-have!

Unix/Linux Command Overview

niels — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:19:41 +0000

You are new to *nix and/or you need a concise overview of your new toys’ command line tools? Then don’t miss the Unix Toolbox!

Whether you are looking for a handy summary to carry around, or a help to get started quickly – this is what you are looking for.

Running NetBeans 6.7 on Mac OS X

niels — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:05:58 +0000

NetBeans 6.7 has just been released, and I am really curious about it. Installation worked like a charm, but the app failed when being launched in the Finder.
I tried “open /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans\ 6.7.app/” in the Terminal, but all I got was “LSOpenFromURLSpec() failed with error …”.
Luckily there’s this blog with a decent solution:
1. open Terminal.app and log in as root (sudo -s)
2. enter this:
# cp -p /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/bin/java /tmp/java_original_binary # lipo /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/bin/java -remove x86_64 -output /tmp/java # cat /tmp/java > /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/bin/java
NOTE: you need root powers for this hack – don’t try this if you don’t understand the code. If it fails you are on your own…

Feel free to launch NetBeans now

Putting Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard To (Deep) Sleep

niels — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:38:25 +0000

I just noticed one nifty feature of my MacBook Pro: “automatic” deep sleep.
When you close the lid of your MB(P) and the white light on the front begins to flash slowly, it has suspended. As soon as you open it, it will wake up and fetch its session data from ram. That takes just a few seconds, and then you are good to go.
But what happens if the Mac loses power while suspended? All data stored in ram would be lost, and a normal reboot would be required. So a “suspend to disk” seems to be a better choice – but a wake-up would be pretty much slower.
Mac OS X is pretty clever: it seems to go for “suspend to ram” by default, but persists your session to disk as well. So you get a fallback (“wake from disk”) whenever the Mac has been suspended, but “wake from ram” failed.

Recommended Putty Settings

niels — Mon, 25 May 2009 20:26:58 +0000

I really like PuTTY – it might not be the perfect terminal emulator, but it does its job quite well. But sometimes you need to fumble around a bit to find the perfect settings for yet another server.

However, I found these default settings with quite useful:

Window -> Appearance -> Font: Courier New or Lucida Console
Window -> Translation -> Character Set: UTF-8
Window ->Translation -> Line Drawing: Use Unicode Line drawing code points