Fuzzy Logic » Tip

VNC in Ubuntu 11.04 Fix

Jason Young — Tue, 31 May 2011 19:44:35 +0000

Vino, the VNC server that’s set up by default in Ubuntu 11.04, has a huge problem: it doesn’t refresh after the initial login. You can click and type and it’ll register, but it won’t actually redraw the screen. The following post has the solution:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=10775950&postcount=13

Digimesh Connectport X2B in TCP/UDP server mode

Jason Young — Mon, 16 May 2011 12:44:48 +0000

So, my boss recently bought a Connectport X2B for me to develop with. I wanted to use the feature for forwarding via TCP, but saw absolutely nothing regarding that in the interface. So, after about a day of digging, I found the following link (and, more importantly, the implications of it): ConnectPort X2 – 802.15.4.

On that page are different firmwares. It turns out that my ConnectPort was loaded with 82002161_B2.bin firmware. This would be fine, except I wanted the ConnectPort to forward my packets for me. It turns out that, from there, I needed to actually use 82002162_B2.bin to give my ConnectPort the appropriate software. Okay, but no big deal. All would be fine after that! All I had to do would be throw it into TCP or UDP server mode and away I would go.

Incorrect. While setting up the TCP server options I came across this help page:

Help page for ConnectPort showing TCP Server

This would be extremely helpful, except for the tiny fact that the feature was removed from the web interface and never removed from the documentation. This seems to be the story of the Digi documentation. It is either incorrect or misleading, which can be incredibly frustrating. Not that I’m frustrated.

Anyhow, it turns out that, at this point, you have to revert to the terminal help documentation to get from there. Ignoring the fact that their terminal doesn’t support the traditional backspace (gotta ^H it) and is slower than anything I’ve used since the third grade, it actually provides a useful interface to the device. Looking at the commands set autoconnect for TCP server settings and set udpserial for UDP server settings makes it work.

Or, at least in the case of UDP, ‘kinda’ makes it work. I currently have a situation where it seems to be dropping two bytes every packet when it sends me the data over UDP, so I’ll be talking to Digi about it today….

Digimesh Realport for Windows 7 x64

Jason Young — Thu, 12 May 2011 12:04:17 +0000

For some reason, the version of Realport included on the CDs won’t work. Instead, you have to download it from their site:
http://ftp1.digi.com/support/driver/40002549_e.zip
Once you download that, run the Setup64.exe
Link obtained from
http://forums.digi.com/support/forum/viewthread_thread,7603

Digimesh API Packet Spec

Jason Young — Tue, 10 May 2011 14:40:01 +0000

Took me too damned long to find this…
http://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Wireless/Zigbee/XBee-2.5-Manual.pdf
Pages 55-70

EDIT: That is outdated, the newest version is here: http://ftp1.digi.com/support/documentation/90000991_C.pdf

Symbolic Links in Windows 7

Jason Young — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 13:37:51 +0000

Posting this here because I always forget where it is:

http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html

Best. Thing. Ever.

DigiMesh 2.4 XBee Drivers for 64-bit Windows 7

Jason Young — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 19:53:16 +0000

My boss purchased the Digimesh 2.4 Development Kit. I was hoping to develop with it on Windows 7 x64, but the included drivers didn’t work. I contacted Digimesh and they linked to the support page. Somehow I was unable to find it but oh well.

The specific link to the drivers was located at ftp://ftp1.digi.com/support/driver/ftdi_WindowsVistaDrivers.zip.

Geant4 and the bad_alloc() error

Jason Young — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:22:23 +0000

I was having some problems running large simulations (500k+ particles) in Geant4. Every once in a while I would get a std::bad_alloc() error. A reboot seemed to fix it but I didn’t understand WHY this would be a problem. Anyhow, I found this post which seems to be onto a possible solution. Simply increasing the memory your shell has access to seems to fix this memory error. We’ll see….

whereas increasing the stack size by using the command ulimit -s 900000 allowed the program to run apparently without a crash:

EDIT: Nevermind, I had created a bomb. Oops.

Fixing Windows Media Sharing filenames not updating

Jason Young — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:43:48 +0000

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.

Adding your Thunderbird contacts to GMail

Jason Young — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:26:13 +0000

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 AIR 1.5 for Linux (finally)

Jason Young — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 13:21:08 +0000

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!

Getting Adobe AIR for Ubuntu 8.10 couldn’t be easier. Visit the Adobe AIR download page and it’ll automatically detect your system type from your browser’s settings. The file is a .bin file which means you don’t have to compile it. Assuming you download it with firefox, simply fire up your terminal, change to your download directory (probably ~/Desktop) and issue

nuke@nuke-laptop:~/Desktop$ chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin 
nuke@nuke-laptop:~/Desktop$ sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Note: I was getting a very nondescript error when I ran that command saying that Adobe AIR couldn’t be installed and, of course, that was about all of the information I got. I found out it was because I had the Adobe AIR 1.1 beta installed, which I needed to uninstall. If you get that, simply run the following command (on Ubuntu):

nuke@nuke-laptop:~/Desktop$ sudo dpkg -r adobeair-enu

and you’ll be fine. If you’re still having problems,definitely look at Adobe’s short FAQ on AIR 1.5. It will give you a few things to try. I also had to uninstall my previous AIR stuff with the following commands:

nuke@nuke-laptop:~$ rm .appdata/ -rf
nuke@nuke-laptop:~$ rm .adobe/AIR/ -rf
nuke@nuke-laptop:~$ rm .macromedia/Flash_Player/www.macromedia.com/bin/air* -rf

Then, to get things working, I had to go to the Flash Player download site and download the newest version of Flash! Also, for anything else that I had installed for AIR (such as twhirl) I had to go in and manually remove it from Ubuntu’s package system. Now, with most AIR apps, they name the package $appname.air.123o1u4831414323 or somesuch. However, with twhirl, it installs it as de.makesoft.twhirl.0ea062bc275e7ed1e6ec3762effd73c7158adf33.1 (at least for me) so I had to run

nuke@nuke-laptop:~$ sudo dpkg -r de.makesoft.twhirl.0ea062bc275e7ed1e6ec3762effd73c7158adf33.1

That let me reinstall twhirl. If you can’t find that exact app but have the same problem, try autocompleting (tab) in the terminal after you type “de.makesoft”. After all of that work, it was working great. Finally!