languor.us

Here I was, earlier today, simply trying to swap the default gateway of the Ethernet card of my Windows 7 box, and ran into the following peculiarity. First off, as soon as I swapped the gateway, my Ethernet connection went down. To investigate this, I popped into the command-line and tried pinging the new gateway only to run into the error message below:
General failure.

Off late, I have had to use OpenOffice.org's Calc quite regularly. While it generally works quite well, it has a lot of wonky little bugs that can be quite frustrating. One of these has to do with the autofilter.

When using the autofilter, you will, on occasion find that once you are done using it and try to remove it, a number of rows, usually empty, will be missing post-removal. The following are steps/tools that might help you recover these rows:

Last week, I noticed that my computer was becoming really sluggish and the fans, extremely noisy. Seeing as to how I had an inkling that this was due to my CPU heating up or rather, not being cooled enough, and the fact that Windows wasn't telling me what the temperature was, I was in the hunt for a utility to report CPU temperatures in real time. I could, of course, check it via my BIOS. But I wanted a utility to be able to run under load.

Compiling KTorrent 3.3 RC1 on Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic with KDE 4.3:

Update 1: This works with 3.3 final as well.
Update 2: This works with 4.0 beta1 as well.

1. Install cmake and related tools:
   sudo apt-get install cmake automoc build-essential gettext
2. Install other required libraries:
   sudo apt-get install kdelibs5-dev kdebase-workspace-dev kdepimlibs5-dev python-kde4 libboost-dev libtag1-dev libqca2-dev libgmp3-dev

I had no idea how long the windows box I'm using has been up for... While on Linux, I could've just typed uptime to find out, it appears that m$ never expected their systems to be up long enough to bother with such a utility.

A little digging around and some experimentation unearthed the following methods for finding this out on XP:

1. Open a command prompt and type "systeminfo" and look for "system up time". This might require an updated system.

While doing some routine cleaning up of installed programs on my Windows box, I ran into an entry that simply said "vjOcx1.9"... I had no idea what this was, nor was any related information terribly helpful. Some googling later, I found that that this is very like connected to TV4Africa, a p2p TV player that IIRC, I installed to watch snooker via the net (It didn't work).

Hope this helps somebody out there :)

Besides P2P, the rise of sites like Rapidshare, Megaupload and the like have provided another avenue for pirates (and other legitimate users of course ...) to peddle their wares. Unlike P2P, there is no upload and related politics involved and matters are attended to with straightforward HTTP downloads (which are usually quite speedy). Most of these sites have a premium option as well as a hamstrung free option.

Upgrading KTorrent from 3.1.2 to 3.2 RC1 on Kubuntu 8.10 Intrepid with KDE 4.2:

1. Install cmake and related tools:
   sudo apt-get install cmake automoc build-essential gettext
2. Install other required libraries:
   sudo apt-get install kdelibs5-dev libqca2-dev libgmp3-dev kdebase-workspace-dev kdepimlibs5-dev libkrosspython0 libkrossruby0
3. Remove the existing ktorrent installation as a precaution: sudo apt-get remove ktorrent. This should not affect your configuration files.

For those of you out there who have been hankering for a decent free, open-source file renaming utility, I highly recommend that you give Métamorphose a shot. I've been using the v2 beta in XP and it's been excellent. It's written in Python and is also available for Linux, BSD and Macs.

There are a few minor UI bugs though, but I'm sure that they'll be sorted out in due course.

Hooray for FOSS!

An excellent story on How to make money with free software has been doing the rounds today, and deservedly so. While I won't spoil the surprise for you here, I must say that I like the back better than the front :)