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[This post regards Firefox 3.0.7 under Ubuntu 8.10]

Here’s what happened to me today: I wrote a small Bash script which automated several tasks that I perform often – namely, running two server instances and opening a number of graphical applications. One of the commands in the script opened a web page in Firefox. So far, so good. However, when I ran the script it froze before executing all of the commands it contained. Read the rest of this entry »

My Apache saga continues . After successfully installing Apache and PHP I tested a sample file with phpinfo() and everything worked just fine. However, any other PHP files I tried to run were not displayed and instead Firefox offered me to download them. Weird, huh? So, I re-installed everything several times but to no avail. In my despair I downloaded Opera and, interestingly enough, it displayed all files without any problems. It took me about two hours of googling and messing with Apache to find out that what caused this peculiar issue was hidden in the /etc/apache2/apache2.conf file and the default HTTP headers it sends to the client browser. It turns out that the default installation of Apache sets the DefaultType to text/plain, which Firefox obviously doesn’t like very much. To fix the problem, simply change text/plain to text/html and you should be fine.

It may be just me, but I think Ubuntu’s aptitude has room for improvement when it comes down to removing packages. Here’s what happened to me: I was trying to make Subversion and Apache work together but things messed up when SSL came into play and Apache started complaining about not being able to resolve its server name. So, I decided to start over from scratch and removed Apache with apt-get. However, the /etc/apache2/ directory with all the configuration files was still there after apt-get supposedly removed the package. OK, I told myself, not a big deal. Read the rest of this entry »

Today when I started my Ubuntu box it greeted me with a message that it will boot in low-graphics mode. The reason -  the config file for the display could not be parsed. I didn’t remember installing any updates the previous day, so I didn’t really know what caused the corruption of the config file. Anyways, I managed to resolve the problem with the following:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf_backup
sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

After executing these two I rebooted and everything was back to normal. Hope that helps to someone!

I recently had to conduct an interview for a Public Speaking class I am taking. I didn’t have any suitable equipment to record the interview so I had to use my cell phone. After the interview I downloaded the recording to my computer and saw that the file’s name ended with “.amr”. I had never encountered such files before, so I did some research and it turned out that “amr” stands for “Adaptive Multi-Rate” codec. This is a compressed audio format that was originally developed by Ericsson and is used by many 3G cell phones for voice recordings since the algorithm that is used for the encoding was designed to efficiently compress human speech audio. Read the rest of this entry »

I found a couple of pretty interesting videos on Youtube showing how people are succeptible to subliminal messages. I’m not sure about the authenticity of what’s demonstrated in the videos but it certainly is an intriguing possibility.

I added to the Downloads section a small Silverlight application I wrote for an Algorithms course I’m taking. It’s basically a visual demonstration of the Delaunay triangulation. My implementation of the algorithm is based on Paul Bourke’s “Efficient Triangulation Algorithm Suitable for Terrain Modelling” and I want to express my gratitude for his great job. You can check out the app at the Downloads section.

This Wednesday I successfully presented the first part of my Senior Project at AUBG – the Web Metrics Monitor (WMM) project. The purpose of the project is to provide a robust, user-friendly and accessible web analytics tool. So far I’ve implemented the basic functionality and user interface. The back-end is implemented in PHP and includes a data retrieval module collecting the data, “engine” that is doing the processing of the raw data, and a data transfer module that is responsible for sending the summarized data to the UI. The data transfer module is making use of AMFPHP to send the data to the FLEX UI. As for the UI – it is available both as a Web app and as a desktop app via AIR. Here is a list of the metrics that are collected so far: Read the rest of this entry »

I needed to use a DateTimeAxis for my senior project, but encountered a strange problem – data points were displayed with varying offset relative to the corresponding ticks on the x-axis. I couldn’t find anything explaining why this might be happening in the Flex documentation. Luckily, I found a very simple solution/explanation of the problem here. [Actually the displayLocalTime=”true” solution from the comments is even simpler and worked for me]

After experiencing some problems caused by my hosting providers switching to PHP5, I finally upgraded to 2.5.1. However, the del.icio.us and BadBehavior plugins are not functioning entirely correctly. I had to edit the del.icio.us plugin not to display the “added xx ago” string because it was giving an error from the date() function. The problem with the BadBehavior plugin was that it wasn’t displaying correctly the stats at the page footer – resolved by simply unchecking the corresponding box in the settings.