Fuzzy Logic

I use my Windows Media Player to share media over the server.  One of the problems we have, however, is that our media names are confusing due to weird naming schemes by various groups.  My apartment has established a standard naming scheme (Show Title.SeasonEpisode.Episode Name.ext), but it wasn’t showing up as the new names once we changed them.  It seems that Windows Media Player will see the newly named file, but keeps the old name as the file display name.  What you have to do is delete it from your WMP library and then rescan those folders.  That solved it for me.

As part of my ongoing saga to get my Blackberry to a usable condition with all of my contacts, I’ve been wanting to put all of my contacts into Gmail.  While the Thunderbird plugin Zindus works magic for syncing your contacts, I’m having real trouble getting contacts to work between GMail (which, thanks to Google Mobile Sync, now only holds my phone’s address book) and Thunderbird, which holds all of my emails.  I’ve decided to import all of my Thunderbird contacts to GMail and then edit them from there.  Unfortunately, whenever you import things into GMail from Thunderbird in Thunderbird’s default .CSV file, GMail doesn’t properly parse the contact info.  Luckily, I found this blog post with a solution.  It only works for Linux users, but that’s fine with me.

The only real problem with this solution is that GMail doesn’t offer a ‘merge contacts’ option.  I don’t exactly know why they don’t, seeing as how it doesn’t seem like a hard thing to implement and even Hotmail has it.  Until they implement it, however, I’m stuck with manually editing contacts. This is going to take quite a while…

Adobe announced on December 17th that AIR 1.5 is now available for Linux!  This is a pretty big deal for Linux users because the previous version we were using was a buggy version that didn’t have all of the newest features (and was unreliable at that).  With this new release comes the new version for both x86 and x64 processors!  Read on for the whole explanation!

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In my research I work with the Physics simulation software GEANT4.  It’s an incredibly detailed and realistic package, but it’s an absolute beast to get working.  A while ago one of my coworkers found this site and it makes it incredibly easy.  It went down a while ago, but you can find it at http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~skirkwoo/GEANT4-Kubuntu.html now.  I believe the old link is up as well, but the newer link is Dr. Kirkwood’s official site.  It’s a really great install and very valuable because it works on 8.04 (Hardy Heron), which is a Long-Term Service release.  The guide is for Kubuntu, but it works great on Ubuntu as well.

A quick note about using newer version of Ubuntu: From 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) on, Ubuntu doesn’t come with a g77 package. g77 is not used for GEANT4 specifically, but with CERN’s ROOT, which is an amazing statistical analysis package. You won’t NEED this for GEANT4, but it allows you to do some cool stuff.  Anyhow, instead of g77, Intrepid (8.10) comes with ‘gfortran’ which is not the same code, it seems.  Now, there are two ways on handling it.  I, personally, advise sticking to 8.04 and the g77 it comes with.  However, you can use a newer version of Ubuntu (or its variants) and either use Hardy packages or install from source.  Either way, it’s nice to have ROOT installed for statistical analysis.

As a side note, I’m hoping to (eventually) post a complete walkthrough of the process I go through when compiling CLHEP, GEANT4, and ROOT on a 8.04 machine.  It’ll probably be a while before I manage to get it written up, but it sure would be nice…

Just a quick fix for this problem–I’m more posting this for myself than anyone else.  Anyhow, if you have at one point installed the non-official Java package and then installed the sun-java6-jre package set, you may be missing some things.  The error I was getting was

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError:
Can't load library: /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/i386/xawt/libmawt.so

The exact error being:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Can't load library: /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/i386/xawt/libmawt.so
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1666)
at java.lang.Runtime.load0(Runtime.java:787)
at java.lang.System.load(System.java:1022)
at java.lang.ClassLoader$NativeLibrary.load(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary0(ClassLoader.java:1767)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1684)
at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Runtime.java:840)
at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java:1047)
at sun.security.action.LoadLibraryAction.run(LoadLibraryAction.java:67)
at sun.security.action.LoadLibraryAction.run(LoadLibraryAction.java:47)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.awt.Toolkit.loadLibraries(Toolkit.java:1610)
at java.awt.Toolkit.<clinit>(Toolkit.java:1632)
at java.awt.Component.<clinit>(Component.java:568)
at CreditSystem.main(CreditSystem.java:17)

The solution I found was to issue the following command

sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

That will update your files and fix it. Fun fun…