August 2008
1 post
Tuesday, August 12th - Make tables appear in PDF...
Apache FOP is sophisticated rendering package for translating from a valid document specified in the XSL-FO formatting language into a variety of output formats such as PDF, PNG, and RTF.
I ran into a weird issue where I was converting HTML into XSL-FO using a well-known stylesheet for this purpose, and then converting from the XSL-FO into PDF. For some reason, HTML tables were appearing in RTF...
June 2008
1 post
Wednesday July 11th - Upgrade the MySQL JDBC...
On two separate occasions, I’ve downloaded open source war-based Java applications that install and run perfectly well in a recent Tomcat, only to discover that I am unable to log in with the default administrator credentials. From a bit of debugging, it appears that the hash function for generating the password hash does not generate something that matches the database column. I...
April 2008
5 posts
Daily Fix - Tuesday, April 15 2008
I needed to check in some subversion code that lived on someone else’s machine, and normally that code is managed via Eclipse/Subclipse. However, I couldn’t launch Eclipse “as them”, even though I could access the code via the command line. The problem was that the code is checked out via svn+ssh, and I didn’t know the user’s ssh password, so I needed it to be...
Daily Fix - Saturday April 12th 2008
My Toshiba laptop started suddenly refusing to suspend and resume on Fedora Core 8 after I did some upgrades. It turns out that, at least based on my experimentation, the kvm and kvm_intel (for doing virtualization on Linux) modules are the culprit. Luckily, the fix for this is easy. If it doesn’t already exist, create the file: /etc/pm/config.d/unload_modules Add a line to that file:...
Standards conformance - GNU Coreutils →
More info about the magic _POSIX2_VERSION flag; note it isn’t limited to the tail command.
Daily Fix - Friday, April 11th 2008
I often need to grab older versions of libraries and applications, and I’ve encountered a recurring problem when I pull down an application packed as a self-extracting archive for Linux. These usually end in .bin and force you to accept some sort of agreement, then unpack themselves. I’ve seen this with older version of the Sun Java release (i.e. 1.4 and before) on Linux, but it...
Get your daily fix
I spend most of my day fixing things. I often come across or develop workarounds or fixes for niche problems, by which I mean problems that the average user is unlikely to have, but which developers working with a particular system might be very likely to encounter. Since I don’t really have time to blog regularly, I thought that creating a tumblelog to capture these, once a day or every...