Things n' Stuff | Thoughts about the universe in general

One of the most annoying issues with Linux’s graphical system (and any UN*X), is that if you have some keys setup for switching the keyboard layout – when using two or more keyboard layouts, such as for writing English and Hebrew – then that key combination cannot be used in any other keyboard shortcut.

Its most annoyingly present when setting the keyboard layout switching command to ALT+SHIFT (like in MS-Windows), then you can’t do any keyboard shortcut that has ALT+SHIFT in it – such as ALT+SHIFT+TAB to move to the previous window.

Well, finally there is a solution! As detailed in FreeDesktop.org’s Bugzilla and Ubuntu’s Launchpad , and thanks to Ilya Murav’jov we now have a patch to solve this ancient X11 problem.

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Here is another script I wrote for work and I thought it will be interesting enough to share:

Say you want to check which JAR files (or ZIP files for that matter, as Java ARchive files are just ZIP files with a different extension) contain files that contain some text. grep is the obvious answer, but how to grep files in JARs?

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Well, they don’t work for me – haven’t worked since Firefox 2, I think.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about then its about the ability of web pages to define keyboard shortcuts to access and enable features on the web page using the keyboard instead of the mouse. Common actions are to focus text edit boxes or to trigger links directly.

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A system administrator in my company recently approached me with a problem – how to shutdown multiple Linux servers at the same time from a central location. Apparently this is something that people in the MS-Windows world use all kinds of applications, like the Remote Shutdown Tool from Microsoft (though I don’t understand how they handle the authentication – this tools doesn’t seem to require any authentication so it appears that any person with network access can shutdown any computer).

Anyway, apparently searching the web for “Linux remote shutdown” yields no useful results (or so I’ve been told), but frankly – when you have standard UN*X tools at your fingertips, a remote shutdown tool is simply typing ssh root@server shutdown -r now at your local console. But still, for people who want a “tool” – read on.

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[Update: initially I thought this problem was limited to IE7 and earlier, I was wrong and it also happens in Internet Explorer 8. Kind of destroys what ever expectations I've had remaining for IE8]

Although Internet Explorer 8 was already released⁽¹⁾ most users are going to stick to previous versions – I know this for a fact as even though Internet Explorer 7 is already more than a couple of years on the market it still only has slightly better then 50% of the Internet Explorer market (not including other browsers).

That being said, its always “fun” finding more Internet Explorer bugs, something which the web developer I’m working with is proficient in (which she isn’t really doing on purpose – I’m not sure if it counts in her favor or not ), so here is the latest one she stumbled upon⁽²⁾: (more…)

1. and it boasts a superior rendering engine – which is almost on par with  Firefox 3: it breaks horribly in the WordPress edit post dialog – its the first serious rendering problem I’ve seen with IE8 [↩]
2. I haven’t documented the several previous ones we encountered – I might do so in the future [↩]

This is another “how to” tech article, anyone who is not interested in such things may stop reading now.

VirtualBox is a great virtualization software (hypervisor as the lingo currently goes) – I believe it matches up nicely against the current VMWare Workstation line and they offer both an open source version which is free for any use as well as a commercial version (with some added features such as SATA support) that is free for personal use.

VirtualBox allows you to take snapshots of the current VM state so that you can safely return to a previous state of your VM if you messed something up (for example – installed too much software on your Windows XP VM). Unfortunately, unlike what the VirtualBox UI will have you think, the snapshot features allows you to take progressive snapshots but you can’t fork your snapshot tree – you can’t create branches off old snapshots. Snapshots which are not current can be either discarded (have their state merged into another state) or reverted too (discard all the newest data and return to the old state).

Additionally, you can’t copy (clone) VMs with snapshots except copying the oldest state⁽¹⁾.

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1. which is most often not what you want. If you don’t mind discarding all of the old snapshots, you can clone the current VMs state using the method described in this VirtualBox forum thread [↩]

As noted below, Fedora 9 came out recently, and I think its time my work computer would get a “brain transplant”. I can’t have a lot of downtime on this machine – its the one I do most of my work on, so this upgrade needs to be a “live updated” – I can’t afford the time to shut it down, load an installation of even a live CD (that doesn’t have my environment) and wait until it installs.

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[The previous article]

Its time to continue the E90 vs. the P1i shootout I think, as I’ve used both for a long time now. most of my last month was spent with the E90 – to compensate for the month or so I used the P1i exclusively before I got the E90, and in the last week I really started to use both at the same time (I’ll expand about it later). Another good excuse for me to get off my butt and write again is that the Sony Ericsson just crashed – hard, to a reset, and for the first time. It had “mini-crashes” before: applications would just crash and put up a dialog box that explained what crashed, but this time I got lots of crash dialogs about stuff I’ve never seen crashing before – including the connection manager – and the top status bar was gone. I was in the middle of writing an email and it wouldn’t send it nor receive any other email, so I quit the messaging application and the standby screen looked ok except for the missing status bar. I started the main menu in hopes that it will reset my status bar and it looked like it did – for a couple of second before the entire screen went blank.

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Up till very recently my main phone was a Nokia 6600 – which was getting very long in the tooth (I think it was introduced more then 3 years ago. My specific device is about 2.5 years old). I love the PDA features, the full network experience (the internal Nokia browser was shit but with Opera For Mobile and Mini Opera you can actually use the web properly), and of course – the ability to run Putty to get SSH access to all my favorite servers . Anyways, I was in a market for a new smart phone, unfortunately the offering in the market right now are very poor, mostly as everything is in a state of transition now – The Windows Mobile platform is moving from the horrendous version 5 to the quite usable version 6, Linux is poised to launch as a major smart phone platform with OpenMoko, Google’s Android, Palm’s Treo devices are aging and we hope to see them soon replaced with the Access Linux Platform (what was once Palm Source), and Nokia… well Nokia are still doing their thing but you can also see that they are thinking about new stuff – if you look at the Nokia internet tablet devices (N810 is the latest) and some exciting demos Nokia had shown.

But still – I need a new phone now and all these exciting new devices will come out – maybe – in middle of 2008. So I have to choose from what I have in front of me, which is not much. Eventually I settled on the Sony Ericsson P1i, which is a very interesting smart phone from Sony Ericsson and is currently their main business offering. I hated many Sony Ericsson phones I’ve used in the past, but I saw some new UIQ3 devices and they seemed very nice so I decided to give it a chance. It also helped that compared to the alternative – a Windows Mobile 6 device – it was about half the price. Then my boss decided that I also need a new phone and went and bought me a Nokia E90 (well – it was a very lengthy and heated discussion and eventually we settled on the Nokia), which is currently the top Nokia business phone. And so the shoot out begins…

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I’ve been using VirtualBox 1.5 to run MS-Windows guest virtual machines under my Linux operating system (Fedora 8 and Ubuntu) for some QA and stuff like that. This post is a summary of my experience with this virtualization solution, mostly so I won’t forget the details, and as such is expected to be updated from time to time.

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