Escape from boredom

After successfully getting access to all my files using the install DVD I did a reinstall. When finished I created a user with the same user id as before. Then logged on and became a bit confused by the fact that it had the same wallpaper as before the crash. Turned out that the reinstall had not deleted anything in the old home folder, and when creating an identical userid I got access to all the old files.

A bit surprised by the fact that a complete reinstall is not really what I thought it should be, but hey…who cares right now!!!

Must admit that I’m still mad because our Macbook Pro decided to crash and not give me access to all our files, but at least I’ve just found a workaround.

Using the Install DVD, insert it and reboot while holding the c-button (makes your Macbook boot from CD/DVD). When the menu appears, from Utilities choose Terminal. With root privileges you have full access to the disk. Then insert a memory stick with enough space and voila. You will find both your memory stick and your hard drive in the folder /Volumes

Using copy (cp) you can copy all the files missing, and a voila…just reinstall the whole thing…and then up and running again.

Still pissed that the home folder got corrupted, but at least I managed to save all the files which I did not have a backup of (I rule!!!)

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