Archive for January, 2010
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
I’ve recently taken a liking to Gmail’s built-in web interface to Google Talk. However, since I started using it for most of my chatting activities, I’ve noticed an odd bug.
If you hover over a contact and then click on the “Video and More” button, you get a nifty menu like this:
What I’m interested in is the option to “Always show” or “Never show” a contact. If I have a contact that I don’t talk to very often, or if a contact has several accounts but only uses one of them most of the time, I may want to hide some of them from my list. Additionally, there are some people that I might want to have on my list all the time, and not have them hidden at Google’s whim if I don’t talk to them very often.
Well, for some contacts, this setting seemed to be stuck on “Auto.” You could make a selection, and a confirmation message would appear at the top of the screen, but the behavior of the contact on the list would not change, and if you pull up the menu again, it’s still there on “Auto.”
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Tags: Gmail, Google Apps, Google Talk
Posted in Software | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Trying to set up a JSP application on Ubuntu 9.10, using Tomcat 6 and MySQL 5.1 (both from the Ubuntu repositories). I was getting a curious error when trying to get a connection to the MySQL database from the JDBC DriverManager:
SQLException: Communications link failure
The last packet sent successfully to the server was 0 milliseconds ago. The driver has not received any packets from the server.
SQLState: 08S01
VendorError: 0
After searching for a while and going through some solutions that didn’t work for me, I found the answer here. I’m re-posting it because that answer is posted in Spanish. 
All you have to do is open /etc/init.d/tomcat6 in your favorite text editor (as root), find the line that looks like TOMCAT6_SECURITY=yes, and change it to TOMCAT6_SECURITY=no. Then, restart the Tomcat server (sudo service tomcat6 restart). Ta da!! MySQL connections are now working.
Now, there’s probably a better way to do this that doesn’t involve completely turning off “TOMCAT6_SECURITY,” but this seems fine for a small test project which is what I’m working on (it will eventually be deployed on the JBoss server). I’ll be sure to update this post if I find it… or if you know anything, leave a note in the comments below.
Tags: Java, MySQL, Ubuntu
Posted in Software | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
A bit over a month ago, I purchased a copy of Yoshi’s Island DS on eBay.
Well, I tried to, anyway. I used to have this game, but I don’t know what happened to the cartridge, so I was looking to get it replaced cheap-ish.
I’ve never received counterfeit merchandise from an eBay seller before, so I was a bit surprised when I received a non-genuine game. But, there were a few warning signs that I should have seen before I ordered it (though I did make sure to buy from a U.S. seller, as I hear that this is often a problem with games coming from, say, China). Here what happened to me; maybe this will help out people in similar situations if they stumble across this page while Googling for information.
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Tags: eBay, Nintendo DS, Nintendo DSi
Posted in The World Online | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Three tab tricks in Firefox 3.6:
Open tabs on the right.
In Firefox 3.6, the default behavior is that when you open a new tab from a link on the page, it appears just to the right of the active tab. The old behavior was to have it appear at the very end of your list of tabs. To get the old behavior back, go to >about:config and set the value browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent to false.
Ctrl+tab previews.
To get an about:config and set browser.ctrlTab.previews to true. Note, you can press Ctrl+Shift+Tab to show the expanded list of tabs, Ctrl+Tab just shows your most recent ones.
Windows 7 taskbar previews of all tabs.
If you are using Windows 7, you can go to about:config and set browser.taskbar.previews.enable to true. Now, the Windows 7 taskbar will have a preview for each tab, rather than just one for each Firefox window. (Note that this feature works off-and-on for me, I think that it’s probably not completely finished which is why it is not yet on by default.)
Tags: Mozilla Firefox
Posted in Software | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
In earlier versions of Windows, if you had files or folders with NTFS permissions assigned to the “Administrators” group (i.e., “Administrators” are allowed to edit the files but other users are not), they applied to all users in the Administrators group like you would expect. In Windows Vista and Windows 7 (with UAC enabled), a process must be elevated and be running as a user in the Administrators group to be given these permissions. This is fine when you’re dealing with stuff on your local machine… when you try to do something with a file that you need administrative permission to do, Windows just prompts you to elevate, and you may get a UAC prompt depending on your system settings.
But if you are dealing with stuff on a different machine, perhaps by Windows file sharing, there’s no way to elevate yourself. So, if you are trying to access a shared folder that only “Administrators” are allowed to access, even if you are a member of the “Administrators” group, you will not be able to access it.
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Tags: Windows 7, Windows Vista
Posted in Software | No Comments »
Monday, January 4th, 2010
One of the cool things about Windows Vista is that, if you have an installation DVD for Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, or Ultimate, you can use it to install any of those editions — which one you get just depends on which product key you enter at the beginning of the installation. For some reason, Microsoft took this cool tidbit away from Windows 7. The disc you get only lets you install one edition.
However, there’s an easy way to turn such a “locked” disc into a disc that will install any edition again, just like with Windows Vista.
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Tags: Windows 7
Posted in Software | 9 Comments »
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