I had a very busy weekend out of town, with no internet connection. So this one comes one day late. Sorry for that 
Memento (comic #3)
July 11th, 2011
Going home… (comic #2)
July 3rd, 2011Still posting to this blog. Have no time to set up a dedicated domain and blog and all that 
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MS Office COM/OLE objects to Open Office
June 30th, 2011I have some applications written to use MS office COM. Specifically Excel. Everything was working nice and dandy until today. Because some time ago I decided to permanently move to open office and hence uninstalled MS Office. And today I had to use an application that was using the ms office OLE objects.
A little search found the solution. Transparent and without needing to rewrite/re-compile your applications:
AutomateIt: http://sourceforge.net/projects/automateit/
Just install and you’re ready to OLE.
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I think I crashed pixton…
June 22nd, 2011I was working on my second comic (ahead of time, to be on the safe side) and I went for a 3 panels directly (instead of the 1+any as in the first case) and after I finished the first panel I just clicked on the second one directly, without saving or anything. Aaaaand everything went dead. I mean the entire server is dead. It’s not just me, downornot.com also reports it down (well, actually, it doesn’t report it up. It just freezes there as well).
But, I like to think of it as a mere coincidence. No way I did this…
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My first online comic
June 22nd, 2011It’s not really a comic per se, as in it’s not really funny. Ok, so it’s not funny at all, but still, it might bring some smiles to one or two people. Maybe one. Think positive.
As I’m using a 3rd party online software to “create” it. It is supposed to be a weekly comic, so hopefully, I won’t forget to update it weekly.
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Installing mythtv on centos 5.x (part 2)
April 11th, 2011todat, the mythtv saga continues.
next command in the how-to says
[root@localhost ~]# yum update
….
Error: Missing Dependency: pwlib >= 1.10.1 is needed by package ekiga-2.0.2-7.0.2.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: libpt_linux_x86_r.so.1.10.1 is needed by package ekiga-2.0.2-7.0.2.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: pwlib >= 1.10.1 is needed by package opal-2.2.2-1.1.0.1.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: libpt_linux_x86_r.so.1.10.1 is needed by package opal-2.2.2-1.1.0.1.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: libx264.so.107 is needed by package libquicktime-1.2.1-1.el5.rf.i386 (installed)
Upsie daisy. Ok, I admit, I spent about 1 hour, finding the same shitty 3 post news thread from atrps on a dozen sites and the it finally hit me: god damn freaking priorities. They surealy are bad when you use a lot of test and 3rd party repos. Ok, so I disabled it entirely.
Now, at this stage you must make sure you remember: your system is f*cked up. It has packages from different repos, test repositories. Unstable, not completely tested and so on.
now, back to our screwed up system. we need to do some cleaning. First, lets remove all the conflicting packages.
[root@localhost ~]# yum remove libquicktime-1.2.1-1.el5.rf.i386 opal-2.2.2-1.1.0.1.i386 ekiga-2.0.2-7.0.2.i386 ekiga-2.0.2-7.0.2.i386
[root@localhost ~]# rpm -qa | grep pwlib
pwlib-1.10.1-7.0.1.el5
[root@localhost ~]# yum erase pwlib-1.10.1-7.0.1.el5
[root@localhost ~]# rpm -qa | grep libx264
libx264_114-0.114-15_20110308.2245.el5
[root@localhost ~]# yum erase libx264_114-0.114-15_20110308.2245.el5
yum install still gives the same old crap.
what next? fucking windows, that’s what’s nexts. How the fuck can you build a software that cannot be installed on a fresh system? Seriously. I tried knoppmyth, mythtv, freevo and a bunch of other linux based dvr/pvr but NONE worked nor installed right. Are you linux people really that fucked up? Only stuff from base repos are really working. isn’t there any serious guy out there with a 3rd party repo that is properly kept in sync and relatively uptodate? How the hell are you expecting to get linux out to the masses when a fucking linux sysadmin can’t install your freaking software?
I wasted weeks on this shit you idiots. WEEKS. Windows solution is slow but at least IT WORKS.
So eat shit, you twits.
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Installing mythtv on centos 5.x
April 11th, 2011I tried knoppmyth. Didn’t work for me. For some reason, even though I noticed it picked upo my card, I just couldn’t find it in the menus to be able to watch or record anything from tv.
So, I decided to go the old fashioned way.
You will go on mythtv site, read the wiki how-to for installing on centos. then you continue with the howto for installing on fedora as instructed there.
Now, after you got the new kernel and stuff set up, reboot.
Now, you go on with isntalling packages and you end up with mythtv. But, bummer.
at any one point, you’ll get errors like:
Missing Dependency: libpt_linux_x86_r.so.1.10.1 is needed by package opal-2.2.2-1.1.0.1.i386 (installed)
make sure you install all needed keys. like:
[root@localhost ~]# rpm –import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY*
[root@localhost ~]# rpm –import http://rpm.livna.org/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEY
[root@localhost ~]# rpm –import http://freshrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY-freshrpms
[root@localhost ~]# rpm –import http://packages.atrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
and then finally
[root@localhost ~]# yum install mythtv
….
Error Downloading Packages:
myththemes-0.24-177.noarch: failure: myththemes-0.24-177.noarch.rpm from atrpms: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.
that’s ok, it was just an internet kickup. run install once more…
[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# yum install mythtv
….
Transaction Check Error:
file /usr/share/man/man3/Tie::Watch.3pm.gz conflicts between attempted installs of perl-Tk-804.029-2.el5.pp.i386 and perl-Tie-Watch-1.301-1.el5.pp.noarch
file /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/Date/Manip.pm conflicts between attempted installs of perl-DateManip-5.44-1.2.1.noarch and perl-Date-Manip-6.14-0_15.el5.noarch
file /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/Date/Manip.pod conflicts between attempted installs of perl-DateManip-5.44-1.2.1.noarch and perl-Date-Manip-6.14-0_15.el5.noarch
file /usr/share/man/man3/Date::Manip.3pm.gz conflicts between attempted installs of perl-DateManip-5.44-1.2.1.noarch and perl-Date-Manip-6.14-0_15.el5.noarch
Ouch!
Few hours of googleing results in:
[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# yum erase perl-Date-Manip-6.14-0_15.el5.noarch
resulting in
Package(s) perl-Date-Manip-6.14-0_15.el5.noarch available, but not installed.
so just ingore
[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# yum erase perl-DateManip-5.44-1.2.1.noarch
does the same thing so ignore again
then
[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# yum install perl-DateManip
….
Package perl-DateManip is obsoleted by perl-Date-Manip, trying to install perl-Date-Manip-6.14-0_15.el5.noarch instead
(now this sounds good)
then
[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# yum install perl-Tk
resulting in
Transaction Check Error:
file /usr/share/man/man3/Tie::Watch.3pm.gz conflicts between attempted installs of perl-Tie-Watch-1.301-1.el5.pp.noarch and perl-Tk-804.029-2.el5.pp.i386
Ouch again!
[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# yum erase perl-Tie-Watch-1.301-1.el5.pp.noarch perl-Tk-804.029-2.el5.pp.i386
then
[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# yum install yum-priorities
then edit each repo and set proper priorities (google as I no longer have the link and I’m just too lazy to search the history) (basically all centos good repos will be 1, testing will be like 10, 3rd party will be 10+ making sure that testing and such always get a higher prio than the base fo the 3rd party)
then
[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# yum erase perl-Tie-Watch
and then
[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# yum install perl-Tk
Uau. That worked 
so now do
[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# yum install perl-Tk-TableMatrix
and then again
[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# yum install mythtv
…
Missing Dependency: perl(XML::Twig) >= 3.28 is needed by package xmltv-grabbers-0.5.59-84.el5.noarch (atrpms)
Bummer. Ok, this is now because of priorities 
Remember, we set them up so that testing will not override base. That is usually a good thing to do. So, lets install it manually:
[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# package-cleanup –problems
Doesn’t hurt
now lets ignore priorities because it’s a pain going around them (alternatively, don’t enable them. but it could lead you to issues later on when upgrading):
[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# yum install mythtv –disableplugin=priorities
….
Dependency Updated:
perl-XML-Twig.noarch 0:3.29-11.el5
Complete!
Ta-Dah! There. It installed.
Following days, when I’ll get time, I’ll be getting back if and how I get it working.
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Recover lost tray icon application
March 23rd, 2011It happens once in a while that some applications that are minimized in the system tray loose their icons. But theya re still running just fine. It happened to me with the yahoo messenger client and pidgin IM client, that I remember. Other applications might have been affected as well.
I always tried to find a solution to the proble that:
- did not require rebooting
- did not require killing the application
Today I decided to search until I find something. I was searching for both existing utilities and existing demo code so that I can quickly make a small utility for it. I finally found this: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/winlister.html
You will need to go to options and check the show invisible windows and then you’ll find your application in the list. Select it and choose show window . And voila, your applications main window is now visible. The icon is not put in hte tray, but at least you can use the application
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More than 3 conditional formatting options in OpenOffice Calc
February 23rd, 2011It had to happen
Long story short, I just made a spreadsheet with a list of products in different states and I color coded them. I got 5 states. Conditional formatting only has 3 conditions. If I’d had 4 states, it would have been solved easy, by setting the default formatting for the cells to something and let that be the 4th status.
Now, I did some searches and first thing I found was some macro. Uhm… I don’t quite like to go into macros. Gets your document dependent on stuff. Nasty.
Some more searches showed the STYLE function. It returns 0 (zero). It’s only useful in formula cells. So what do you do if your cell contains some text that is not a formula? Or even if it IS a formula, but you don’t want to change it for whatever reason.
Well, Just move that column to somewhere else, and in place use a formula like:
=IF(STYLE(“Status-” &ROUND(F1))=0;G1; “error”)
BUT FIRST … you need to:
- create 5 styles names “Status-x”, where x ranges from 0 to 4. (Obviously you’ll adapt to your number of colors and naming preferences)
- create the $F column (well, you’ll just use this as helper) in which you will set your status, like 0, 1, 2, 3, 4
- have your $G column be the one with your needed values (the one you moved to, previously)
- and you’ll get “error” (put whatever you like here) in the column if something goes wrong. But the STYLE function will always return 0, even if no style defined, so that won’t help much. But you gotta put something there that will make sense, just in case STYLE will not return 0 (zero)
So I said I’ll be short, so .. till next time.
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Concrete5 MU (MultiSite)
February 6th, 2011As some of you might have read, I am looking for a MU CMS generic solution for my server because I just hate administering tons of software.
So, after WP MU failed miserably from support point of view (http://wordpress.org/support/topic/multi-site-but-not-multi-bloguser) I decided to take a better look at C5 (which I already had installed). And luckily, while browsing the how-tos, I bumped into this nice howto: http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/developers/running-multiple-concrete5-instances-using-a-single-core-on-a-re/
I think I can live with 2 systems: WP MU for the blogs and C5 MU for the rest. Now it’s only a matter of getting “the rest” converted to C5…
First step: the photo gallery (it has some needs that none of the major dedicated photo galleries out there had about 1-2 years ago when I tested them and got stuck with gallery2, which lost some other needed features with their version 3).
Considering how “fast” I move when it comes to such things, I think it is safe to say that you should expect “news” on the subject in say … 6 months 