tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19538223989619798492012-01-25T19:05:14.285+02:00abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.comBlogger421100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-14761523926904380222011-11-29T11:17:00.001+02:002011-11-30T07:51:01.097+02:00

I lost a few hours on this, although I done it sometime ago. To make sure I don't forget it again, here it is: Install geoip packages: sudo apt-get install geoip-bin php5-geoip Download GeoIP Lite version: wget http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz -O /tmp/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz Unzip GeoIP Lite to /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIPCity.dat (this is what I forgot: to rename

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-65277064113011531392010-08-05T18:59:00.000+03:002010-08-05T18:59:31.741+03:00

I found this somewhere (I can't remember where). I'm not using it now, but it's good to know. The CSS is /* @begin columns/sidebars (fixed L,R; liquid C) */ .columns-both, .columns-left {   padding-left: 200px; /* LC width */ } .columns-both, .columns-right {   padding-right: 150px; /* RC fullwidth + CC padding */ } .columns-container .column-main, .columns-container .column-left, .

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-75835266470574088572010-07-06T23:17:00.001+03:002010-08-03T19:24:26.383+03:00

For two years now, I've used OpenVPN to connect to a server where I upload some of the stuff I work on. Until now I always started OpenVPN from the terminal, because I didn't manage to get it working from the Network Manager in the last 4 Ubuntu versions. Last weekend, I had some spare time and I installed Lucid Lynx on my laptop. I tried (again) to get OpenVPN working with Network Manager. As

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-54486402068273938552010-05-24T11:38:00.000+03:002010-05-24T11:38:04.193+03:00

Recently I had to install Matlab 7 on a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop running Windows XP SP3. Everything went OK during installation. However, Matlab failed to start: it started, showed the splash screen, show the full application window, and as soon as the prompt was about to appear, all windows closes. After some googleing I found out that this is caused by Matlab 7 using the wrong version of the

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-62734288813083377032010-05-04T17:06:00.000+03:002010-05-04T17:06:13.572+03:00

These steps summarize the information presented here: http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware. Download and extract the b43-fwcutter. Download and extract the Broadcom drivers. Compile the b43-fwcutter Run the b43-fwcutter to extract the firmware Run the following commands as root and then restart the network service: cd /tmp wget http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-74889776622757398802010-05-03T16:46:00.001+03:002010-05-03T17:00:28.258+03:00

Today I installed another language in one of my Moodle sites. On this occasion I noticed that the login instructions that I setup in the Moodle admin settings are being displayed in Romanian whatever language the user selects. More precisely, in order to tell users to check their spam/bulk folder for the registration email that the site sends, I frequently customize the auth_instructions setting

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-60052270824174611052010-04-29T09:15:00.001+03:002010-04-29T10:21:49.092+03:00

In the last couple of months I looked into solutions for sharing my course presentations (PowerPoint files) with others. My main goal would be to provide an experience as close as possible to the actual in-class courses for people that missed courses. This means that I would like the course content to be available to others as a full-length presentation with an audio narration. The easiest way to

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-4723550526918114592010-03-21T00:45:00.001+02:002010-03-21T00:46:54.926+02:00

Lately I tried to improve the quality of my university's Moodle platform. Among other things (i.e. upgrades, new backup setups, new theme, etc) I also wanted to improve the quality of the Romanian translations. The Romanian language pack of Moodle 1.9 its quite good from the student/user point of view, but it still has some problems: the string for administrator/teacher views, reports, forms are

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-89096170009011385242010-02-14T23:17:00.003+02:002010-02-19T08:13:56.566+02:00

Today I installed a fresh copy of Moodle 1.9. I'm reviewing it in order to upgrade our university's site (from Moodle 1.8) and another site (using Moodle 1.6). As always, I started going through all it's settings, looking for new features or things that changed. When I reached the Language section, I installed the Romanian language, just to make sure installation is working. However, I noticed

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-33998825878120715472010-01-28T10:37:00.000+02:002010-01-28T10:37:30.878+02:00

I recently decided to get my email stored locally in case my internet connection fails and I need them. I used to have them save in Outlook Express (for backup purposes), but I dropped this habbit when I start forwarding everything to Gmail. I decided to give Evolution a shot and see how it's doing these days. This is mainly because of it's "great integration with Gnome". The overall interface

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-75523588466968736202010-01-22T16:08:00.000+02:002010-01-22T16:08:37.232+02:00

As stated in the TightVNC FAQ, in order to hide the tray icon of the server, you need to add/set in the registry the DWORD DisableTrayIcon entry to 1 inside the HKLM\SOFTWARE\ORL\WinVNC3 container. A .reg file that does this automatically is this: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORL\WinVNC3] "DisableTrayIcon"=dword:00000001

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-82022298878794351992010-01-21T11:24:00.002+02:002010-01-22T16:02:59.418+02:00

Everytime I need this information I have to search for it on forums, then filter out the broken solutions in order to find out the corect one. So, I'm posting it here to have it for future reference: Install & setup SumatraPDF and Texniccenter (including the output profiles of TexnicCenter). Open the Output profiles window (Alt+F7). Select the Latex => PDF output profile. In the Latex section,

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-52337457777832723432009-12-24T23:41:00.000+02:002009-12-24T23:41:38.363+02:00

Have you ever wondered how does GMail manage to give us all these nice features? How about what makes it so fast? If you did, you'll find the answer in the following movie. It's a bit technical, but you should understand it even with basic computer skills. Let me know if you did find the answer!

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-69010346106611277832009-12-17T10:55:00.001+02:002009-12-17T10:59:49.456+02:00

Today I was reading a few lines about Python and I stumbled upon this text: the language is named after the BBC show "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and has nothing to do with nasty reptiles I red that before a couple of times, but I never understood the relation between the programming language and the show. I googled up the shows name and (obviously) the first two results were Wikipedia pages.

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-57090958870004826812009-12-07T16:36:00.000+02:002009-12-07T16:36:01.350+02:00

National Geographic is offering wallpaper-sized variants of many of their beautiful photo collections. One of the collections that I follow in iGoogle is the Photo of the day. I like it mostly because it doesn't have a particular theme and includes photos from many places around the world. From time to time, I like some picture so much that I "go through all the trouble" (a 5-clicks process) and

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-67865444951805818452009-11-20T21:22:00.001+02:002009-11-20T21:22:35.542+02:00

These are some old photos of my cats. The gray tabby is no longer with us. It simply disappeared one day. Hopefully, he's doing alright.

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-31136101697182063872009-11-13T22:12:00.004+02:002009-11-16T22:27:11.090+02:00

I buy my Office Supplies at Shoplet.com This is a follow up on my shopping experience with shoplet.com. After my previous attempt to make the deal of a life-time and buy a ultra-modern laptop for only $0.95, I exchanged emails with Keith B. from Shoplet. After our "rocky" start (as he kindly tagged my "I demand an explanation" emails), he was very eager to help me solve my problem. He even went

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-79156824544175454402009-11-11T09:25:00.003+02:002009-11-11T12:14:12.434+02:00

Yesterday I installed Karmic Koala on my office PC. I had a Jaunty installation before that I did not used/customize much so I figured there's not much for me to gain in an upgrade. Thus, I did a fresh install from a 4GB USB stick. The installation went very well, taking less than 15 minutes boot-to-reboot. Another thing I liked is that there was no need to unplug & replug the USB stick during

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-43832049858764389202009-11-10T20:45:00.010+02:002009-11-13T21:01:03.421+02:00

On Friday I was googling for a present for my niece: I was looking for a laptop with small display (less than 13", because she's still small). Not necessarily something fancy, but something that would not create problems when used by a child (enough RAM and decent processing power). While looking around I found a deal that seemed too good to be true (and so it was) on shoplet.com: a laptop Asus

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-8959914638894171162009-11-10T11:16:00.004+02:002009-11-10T11:26:05.832+02:00

Today I noticed that my Octave packages got upgraded to Octave 3.2 (from 3.1). I don't know when that happened, but I immediately typed news to see what's new. I was expecting a few bug fixes, one or two new features and some code rewrites. I was wonderfully surprised by the large number of major changes that come with 3.2.The full list is available on http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/NEWS-3.2.

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-91603538192976437662009-11-08T08:38:00.007+02:002009-11-08T19:18:38.850+02:00

These days I "celebrate" 1 year since I switched to Linux as my main operating system. Before I continue, I have to say that I still use Windows XP at my office (older PC) and occasionaly at home (mostly for existing Texnic Center projects and Microsoft Excel).I started using Ubuntu on a daily basis about 1 year ago (by upgrading from the until-then unfrequently used 8.04 to 8.10). I used Linux

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-36572870797285537562009-08-22T17:29:00.011+03:002009-08-22T18:05:10.506+03:00

I had some spare time two days ago, so I went in the garden to do some cleaning. We ignored it a lot this summer due to our GSoC projects, PhD and papers research, and other activities. Of course, during this outdoors activity, I had the invaluable support of Elena (taking pictures and making fun of me), our cat - Yahoo (ignoring me completely) and the four kittens that showed up in our garden

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-46411784599763108022009-08-16T20:09:00.009+03:002009-08-16T20:35:51.678+03:00

After I finished my previous post, I recalled a few moments when things didn't work the way I wanted (or didn't work at all). One thing led to another and I start thinking what were the main challenges I faced during this project. If I was to make such a list, it would be probably look like this:missing documentation for the recording widgets:for riffly, I had some help from their support team

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-56809039641224239942009-08-15T10:14:00.010+03:002009-08-17T12:07:55.931+03:00

During Google Summer of Code 2009 project I worked on implementing repository plugins that would allow users to record audio files directly into Moodle. Initially, the plan was to provide a single recording only, but things went a bit further, and I also implemented a collection management feature. Both plugins have integrated help pages for all their features, but additional help (mostly for

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-12412401979634838572009-08-02T19:29:00.003+03:002009-08-02T20:13:58.528+03:00

As you may noticed from the previous post's screenshot, GEdit misdetects my Octave .m files as Objective-C code files (because both share the same file extension). Because I don't use Objective-C, I tried to fix this problems like this:I edited the file /usr/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml, commenting out the mime-type tag with type text/x-objcsrc (just search for text/x-objcsrc and

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-61659822018701477782009-08-02T18:58:00.006+03:002009-08-02T19:29:08.035+03:00

I'm trying to replace my Matlab R12/Windows habit with Octave 3/Linux. I installed the QtOctave IDE, but it seems to bulky (especially because I use Gnome). I didn't liked it, so I uninstalled it. Next I tried another approach: I installed the gedit-plugins package which contains the embeded terminal plugin and enabled the filesystem and embeded terminal plugins. My GEdit window setup looks like

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-33960045412022925992009-07-29T20:25:00.003+03:002009-07-29T20:44:17.853+03:00

This is a compilation of the notes I tookon nanogong appet. I think I got everything here and I didn't missed anything.The nanogong applet accepts the following (optional) parameters:SoundFileURL = URL = address of a sound file that should be loaded on applet init (default "")Start = true|false = if true, the applet will start playing the file from SoundFileURL after loading (default false)

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-80874937826360892672009-07-21T13:39:00.003+03:002009-07-21T13:44:13.080+03:00

The riffly plugin repository is almost completed. Jerome is helping me with QA and squashing bugs. The plugin now supports multiple instances (per site, per course and/or per user) and each of this instances can be setup to support only audio media, only video media or audio and video. Also, each instance can be setup to download the riff files locally (for management using Moodle's File API) or

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-79395225777743640662009-07-15T12:03:00.004+03:002009-07-21T13:44:35.249+03:00

The code up to now it's in CVS. I did some changes to the recording scripts, factoring out the common part in record.php. After Jerome noticed that recording is limited to 10s, I fixed that and set a limit to 1 hour. I also fixed some other bugs that Jerome reported and made some changes to the UI (the recording links placed at the top now; no longer mixed with the recorded content). I'm

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-59804429664397939802009-07-09T11:46:00.004+03:002009-07-21T13:44:53.236+03:00

My application for CVS write access was accepted and now I have write access to contrib/plugins/repository/riffly. I'll commit the plugin as soon as possible (probably after I'll do the changes Jerome proposed).

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-31673774392743158872009-07-06T17:01:00.007+03:002009-07-21T13:45:08.121+03:00

This week I "finished" the repository plugin for integration of riffly.com web services. I got carried away so I added more features than I initially planned for (like video recording). Before going into more details, you can go and download the plugin from the ticket #MDL-18341.Instalation: Inside the tgz'ed file you'll find only one folder (called riffly) that you'll have to extract in the

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-67749091043630487812009-06-29T09:45:00.006+03:002009-06-29T19:18:00.946+03:00

My short trip to Iaşi is over. I attendend the ECODAM 2009 Doctoral Summer Workshop. There I assisted to some very interesting lectures (both from invited speakers and from other PhD students) and I also gave a talk about bonds representations in Ising spin glasses.Unfortunatelly, last moment problems before leaving stopped me from submitting the last week's work summary and once got there my

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-83600165038290048092009-06-17T00:45:00.009+03:002009-06-17T11:59:18.162+03:00

The plugin I'm working on is starting to get a face, too. I almost finished the rough user interface. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Mihai's work, but it's enough now for testing the backend. I'll probably have to work on it some more after I get the feedback from Jerome. This is how it looks right now.The user accesses the repository instance (in this case, called something). She/

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-74149937390880025512009-06-08T08:50:00.006+03:002009-06-08T09:28:07.059+03:00

These are some additional information I managed to obtain about the riffly.com services. First of all, the API does not offer an username/password authentication method for premium users. If a user has a premium account, they add their domain in their control panel on riffly.com, so it will auto-detect any riffs that are played from their domain.Second, the metadata for riffs is only available

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-16459593077209549102009-06-01T22:37:00.002+03:002009-06-08T09:26:12.034+03:00

Today I talked to Petr about the plugin progress. The discussion was very useful because he pointed out that teachers are allowed to embed objects and applets, but students aren't (for XSS reasons). It seems that the current method for students to embed objects is providing a link and let the filters take care of the rest (I'll have to check that).

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-45433524334558698762009-06-01T22:28:00.005+03:002009-06-08T09:25:50.395+03:00

I haven't got a reply from riffly.com, yet. It's not urgent, because I can work on other stuff, but I was curious to get more details. I have another batch of questions ready for them, but one thing at a time.

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-63543537872542573372009-05-31T22:57:00.005+03:002009-06-08T09:25:30.849+03:00

This week I've worked the repository plugin for the riffly.com audio services. Starting the plugin was easy. The documentation presents clearly the required first steps. Thei are not hard to follow.Moving on and getting into more details proved harder, due to the gaps in the documentation. For answers to many questions I had to dig into the repository lib code and trace the control flow. I guess

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-23596534316907471472009-05-31T21:51:00.005+03:002009-06-08T09:24:05.223+03:00

All weekend I've tested Netbeans and Eclipse with my PHP projects, mainly Moodle (since it has the larger codebase).I've been using Eclipse Europa with PDT 1.0.3 for almost an year now since Petr recomended it to me. I'm very happy with it, although on a few occations the workspace got corrupted and some of the features stopped working (code completion, code dereferencing, etc).So this weekend I

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-62630146988985535942009-05-23T09:59:00.003+03:002009-06-08T09:22:46.882+03:00

Well, GSoC coding starts today. I finished the functional specification, but I still need to prepare some mockups to make it cleaner. Jerome suggested balsamiq. I'll give it a try.Jerome gave me some very good advices about dealing with common stuff vs. specific issues in it:the question to ask yourself is: What are the difference between java applet and web services for the final users (Moodle

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-27253547959150552102009-05-19T12:22:00.006+03:002009-06-08T09:21:27.864+03:00

Finally, after long and frequent interruptions I was able to complete reading Moodle's Repository API & friends. The specification is still under construction, but it showcases an interesting and powerful concept with a very clean API.

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-15546023533092895632009-05-18T17:28:00.003+03:002009-05-18T17:37:57.738+03:00

Out of the blue, Eclipse is saying that the "Workspace in use or cannot be created". I say ok, probably a lock file was left behind and so I do:rm ~/workspace/.metadata/.lockNo error (so the file was left behind), yet the problem is not solved. I tried clearing out the workspace path. Same problem.Googleing, I found this post, so I ran:sudo gedit /usr/share/eclipse/configuration/.settings/

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1953822398961979849.post-37614050918159667622009-05-07T13:01:00.007+03:002009-05-07T13:41:13.035+03:00

This is my first blog entry. As I write right now, I'm not a big fan of blogs. However, I started this in order to help me keep track of my progress while working on Moodle with Google Summer of Code and other projects I'm doing.It might also prove useful helping me "bookmark" stuff I found useful once and I can't find it anymore (like USP).I've added a task to my Google Calendar to see in one

abautuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02216967074251727387noreply@blogger.com0