Escape from boredom

Spent about an hour or so in total this evening installing WebSphere Community Edition on my own laptop where I run Ubuntu 9.10. Needed an application server to deploy the web applications I create when trying to teach myself how to do Java development. The first try was to install Tomcat 6, which was quite easy using the package manager. But after I had done some thinking I turned to WAS CE instead, why not, since WebSphere is the product I know best (beeing well aware of the fact that under the hood in WAS CE, you will, among various open source projects, find Tomcat as well).

The installation was quite easy, just followed the Quick Start-guide combined with the Setup Troubleshooting (Prerequisites for Ubuntu, read this one first!!). After that I just had some issues with getting WAS CE to understand where to find the correct Java installation, but this guide saved me combined with me just realizing that I have to run it as root. Guess I could avoid that, but who cares, it is my own laptop.

Anyhow, this is the admin console, so the next step will be to deploy applications from Eclipse, but that will be another day…

@Update: Not a problem at all to get rid of the root:root

> su
> cd /opt
> chown -R myuser:mygroup IBM/
> exit
> cd IBM/WebSphere/CeAppServer/bin
> ./start-server.sh

…server started…

Had a problem at work, my laptop running Windows XP kept notifying me every second “Found new hardware Nokia 6280”. A bit tricky to get rid of it, found the solution way down on this post

GO INTO DEVICE MANAGER
GO TO VIEW
SELECT SHOW HIDDEN DEVICES
CLICK THE PLUS SIGN NEXT TO PRINTERS….
IS THEIR AN EXCLAMATION POINT ? if so select properties check and see what it says
TRY SELECTING DISABLE from the properties of it OR SELECT UNINSTALL SEE IF THE PRINTER STILL WORKS

Killed the problem!!

I’ve spent some time, with great help from two of my colleagues, creating a pom.xml using the Maven Ant plugin to call Ant targets in the build.xml file downloaded along with the source code for JMeter. Got the plugin working without to much struggle, but when trying to call “ant compile” from Maven “mvn compile” I got an error saying that no compiler was found since the JAVA_HOME variable was pointing to “…\jdk\jre” But all attempts to change the variable to “..\jdk” just returned the same error. Very strange since I could compile other Maven-projects without any problems and calling compile using Ant directly caused no problem.

But, then as always, Google to the rescue. The line below in bold was all what I needed.

<execution>
<id>compile</id>
<phase>compile</phase>
<configuration>
<property name="build.compiler" value="extJavac"/>
<tasks>
<ant antfile="${basedir}/build.xml">
<target name="compile" />
</ant>
</tasks>
</configuration>
<goals>
<goal>run</goal>
</goals>
</execution>

Found a post where someone else had got an error trying to use the maven-antrun plugin. It is in fact a property passed on to Ant, see ant.apache.org/manual/CoreTasks/javac.html

Have spent some hours today trying to figure out how to edit video and create DVD’s when running Ubuntu. After some reading I ended up trying Kino. First challenge was to import the files from my camera, the Canon FS11. The actual import is not that hard, just plug the USB and navigate in the folder structure of the camera and import.

But, there is an issue with the files on the camera, they are saved using the MOD-file format. Found this post at srixmk.blogspot.com describing how to convert them to avi-format. I used the script but changed it a bit. I wanted to convert the files to .DV, which is the format KINO wants. Thanks to another post that was solved easily as well. So now I have a script which changes the default name of the files to the format yyyyMMddHHMM.dv while converting them to DV and afterwards just deletes the MOD-file. I named the script convertmodfiles.sh, thanks to srixmk for making the script which I just edited a bit.

Then I started testing KINO, using tutorials like “Making movies with KINO” and the “Adding titles and credits. But I could not get it to work, since I did not find “DV Titler” in the drop down menu of available vidoe filters. After very much cursing, I suddenly realized, even though I started to get really tired, that first of all: You don’t need to install DVTitler separately as a plugin, it is included when installing KINO, but…it is labled in the drop down menu as “Titler”. Gotta learn to use my eyes…doh…

So now to bed!