Gonzo has been reborn!
My trusty old Thinkpad has finally died and so I have brought a Fujitsu A531 to replace it. Its not a bad spec for the money I paid (i3 2.2, 8gb, 750gb HDD all for £419).
I have just installed Arch 64 bit on it and had KDE up and running in less than an hour and a half. The first thing I noticed was the graphics acceleration was not enabled and I seemed to be suffering poor framerates. I found that by adding a file called 20-intel.conf to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d directory and adding the following solved my issues :
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "intel"
Option "DRI" "true"
Option "SwapbuffersWait" "false"
EndSection
Reboot and 3D effects and a good framerate where restored.
22 March 2012
28 February 2012
Skype & IIS Clash.
As I am working completely remotely these days I have found my use of Skype increase. This is mainly for chatting to my co-dev throughout the day. Not being a massive Skype fan I actually have it configured for use through Trillian which is quite a good multi-protocol IM client.
Today while mid call with my co-dev I found my Firefox instance hanging and so did an iisreset on my local dev box. Killed Firefox and attempted to start debugging again. Only Visual Studio didn't want to play ball. It showed an error dialog with the following message :
Unable to start debugging on the web server. The server committed a protocol violation. Section=ResponseStatusLine.
OK, that was a new one to me! I started to dig about and found that the caused of the problem was Skype. It appears that Skype will try and use ports 80 and 443 as optional ports to connect on. This meant that IIS was not able to listen to either of these ports.
I killed Trillian (which in turned killed Skype) and all was resolved and I could debug again.
It appears you can disable the option to listen to these ports in Skype. You need to go to :
Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Connection
On this option page you need to uncheck "Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections". Restart Skype and you should find you have no more issues.
Today while mid call with my co-dev I found my Firefox instance hanging and so did an iisreset on my local dev box. Killed Firefox and attempted to start debugging again. Only Visual Studio didn't want to play ball. It showed an error dialog with the following message :
Unable to start debugging on the web server. The server committed a protocol violation. Section=ResponseStatusLine.
OK, that was a new one to me! I started to dig about and found that the caused of the problem was Skype. It appears that Skype will try and use ports 80 and 443 as optional ports to connect on. This meant that IIS was not able to listen to either of these ports.
I killed Trillian (which in turned killed Skype) and all was resolved and I could debug again.
It appears you can disable the option to listen to these ports in Skype. You need to go to :
Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Connection
On this option page you need to uncheck "Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections". Restart Skype and you should find you have no more issues.
22 February 2012
Column Editing Mode For Visual Studio & (G)Vim.
I have been a heavy Visual Studio user for 10 + years. I was re-factoring some code today when I found that it has Column Editing capabilities. This was caused by me getting a keyboard short cut wrong and not noticing as I typed. From a quick Google this appears to be something that has been available for sometime. Usually when I need to do Column Editing in bulk I switch to (G)Vim and have often wished it was available in Visual Studio.
To edit columns in Visual Studio you simple have to hold SHIFT+ALT after selecting the start point with your mouse and then drag to select the columns you wish to edit. Start typing and your columns will all receive the edit.
As a side note Column Editing in (G)Vim is very easy. Simply hit CTRL+V to put you into column editing mode and then select the columns to edit. Once selected hit SHIFT+i to put you into insert mode and start making your edits. Once done hit ESC to exit column editing mode.
To edit columns in Visual Studio you simple have to hold SHIFT+ALT after selecting the start point with your mouse and then drag to select the columns you wish to edit. Start typing and your columns will all receive the edit.
As a side note Column Editing in (G)Vim is very easy. Simply hit CTRL+V to put you into column editing mode and then select the columns to edit. Once selected hit SHIFT+i to put you into insert mode and start making your edits. Once done hit ESC to exit column editing mode.
3 January 2012
SQL Server Express - How Not To Install It!
So new year, new job and new laptop. This is a great way to start the new year.
Working for a new company has meant installing a new Microsoft based development environment, part of which is the freely available SQL Sever Express. Installing it should have been a breeze using the free to download installer (or I believe you can also install using the Web Installer). However, as I had already installed the ASP.Net framework stack it turned into a rather long process.
SQL Express does ship with Management Studio which I think is brilliant considering it's all free! However, when I installed SQL Express there was no option to install Management Studio. I, wrongly, assumed this would just be installed by default. When the install finished I looked for Management Studio but realised it was not installed. After much reading and research I found out that if you install SQL Express as part of the .Net framework installation you are unable to then install Management Studio tools as part of a subsequent instance installation.
That's really not very helpful!
The short version of the rest of the story is that you need to uninstall all instances of SQL server Express and then re install it again. Once you restart the installation you find you have the option to include Management Studio Tools.
Now don't get me started about not being able to change the servers default collation ....
Working for a new company has meant installing a new Microsoft based development environment, part of which is the freely available SQL Sever Express. Installing it should have been a breeze using the free to download installer (or I believe you can also install using the Web Installer). However, as I had already installed the ASP.Net framework stack it turned into a rather long process.
SQL Express does ship with Management Studio which I think is brilliant considering it's all free! However, when I installed SQL Express there was no option to install Management Studio. I, wrongly, assumed this would just be installed by default. When the install finished I looked for Management Studio but realised it was not installed. After much reading and research I found out that if you install SQL Express as part of the .Net framework installation you are unable to then install Management Studio tools as part of a subsequent instance installation.
That's really not very helpful!
The short version of the rest of the story is that you need to uninstall all instances of SQL server Express and then re install it again. Once you restart the installation you find you have the option to include Management Studio Tools.
Now don't get me started about not being able to change the servers default collation ....
21 December 2011
Google Video Chat Fix
My wife and I tend to communicate through gtalk and recently the video chat. However, a couple of nights ago her laptop stopped allowing her to invite people to video call.
After realising it was something to do with the flash plugin I installed the latest version and applied all of the updates to no avail.
After a little Googling I found the answer to be the following and I thought I would post it here in case it's useful to anyone else.
Basically, go to your GMail account settings and find the Labs tab. Scroll right down to the bottom and there should be a Lab for Video Chat Enhancements. Click "Enable" for that lab and then save your settings. It worked a treat and she is now back up and running.
This issue seemed to effect both Chrome and Firefox although other people I have read about only seem to be effected if you use Chrome. Either way that solve her problem.
After realising it was something to do with the flash plugin I installed the latest version and applied all of the updates to no avail.
After a little Googling I found the answer to be the following and I thought I would post it here in case it's useful to anyone else.
Basically, go to your GMail account settings and find the Labs tab. Scroll right down to the bottom and there should be a Lab for Video Chat Enhancements. Click "Enable" for that lab and then save your settings. It worked a treat and she is now back up and running.
This issue seemed to effect both Chrome and Firefox although other people I have read about only seem to be effected if you use Chrome. Either way that solve her problem.
4 October 2011
Arch Linux - LibreOffice Displaying Non English
When LibreOffice was first released I instantly installed it (via pacman) on Arch Linux. Having read lots about the grand work the project was doing to finally bring the project upto date since forking Open Office I was interested to see what they had achieved. I was quite impressed.
I don't do a lot of document based work on my Arch laptop (and there have been a number of updates since I last used it) but I went to type up a letter for the wife tonight and fired up LibreOffice and found the UI was rendering in what appeared to be Russian (which I do not read or write).
After a bit of digging about it appeared I made a fatal error in installing the libreoffice-uk language pack. Turns out that is the Ukrainian language pack ... oops!
It turns out that I am not alone in making this assumption and if you happen to hit this issue and you actually need English and not Ukrainian then install the libreoffice-en-GB language pack and all will be well (and readable) again.
I don't do a lot of document based work on my Arch laptop (and there have been a number of updates since I last used it) but I went to type up a letter for the wife tonight and fired up LibreOffice and found the UI was rendering in what appeared to be Russian (which I do not read or write).
After a bit of digging about it appeared I made a fatal error in installing the libreoffice-uk language pack. Turns out that is the Ukrainian language pack ... oops!
It turns out that I am not alone in making this assumption and if you happen to hit this issue and you actually need English and not Ukrainian then install the libreoffice-en-GB language pack and all will be well (and readable) again.
9 August 2011
Visual Studion 2010 Debugging Time Out.
One thing that has started to bother me since going to a VS 2010/IIS7 setup is that by default the time-out on the debugger is incredible short. You start looking into a problem and be on the point of realisation when a Message Box pops up saying that the thread is aborting.
Helpful, that is not.
After a little digging about I found that it has something to do with the application pool settings in IIS. To increase the time the thread is available open IIS Manager, open the application pool your site is running on and click "Advanced Settings". In the property dialog that comes up there is an item labelled "Ping Maximum Response Time (seconds)". Set this value to your desired value and click OK.
I have mine now set to 6000 which should be enough for now.
Helpful, that is not.
After a little digging about I found that it has something to do with the application pool settings in IIS. To increase the time the thread is available open IIS Manager, open the application pool your site is running on and click "Advanced Settings". In the property dialog that comes up there is an item labelled "Ping Maximum Response Time (seconds)". Set this value to your desired value and click OK.
I have mine now set to 6000 which should be enough for now.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)