Escape from boredom

Nokia + Microsoft. Here we go! 11.2.11

…and my next phone will be running on Android…why? Just because!

Got the error yesterday while trying to install WebSphere using RAFW on an old Linux installation, having the media-folder mounted from a network share on a Windows XP-box. I had unzipped the tar-files containing the installation binaries on my own laptop, then just copied them using Windows Explorer to the pc where I had shared out the folder. Apparently it should be no problem doing this, I could without any problem navigate down the folder structure on the Linux machine viewing all the files. But still I got errors such as the

UNIXProcess.forkAndExec native error: No such file or directory

and later while changing the log level to =ALL, I found

/usr/RAFW/product/actions/install/was/common/install_update_was_common.xml:89: /usr/RAFW/media/linux/X32/was/70/patches/was70_fp13 not found.
but, it was there, I know…

So, after receiving a tip from my colleagues, I deleted the media tree, using ftp transferred the tar-files containing the binaries to the pc with the share, installed Cygwin and unpacked the files using the tar command. Voila…problem solved…stupid, stupid!!! But problem gone, on to the next…

Yesterday my homepage experienced about 12 hours of downtime due to the hosting server host.hostean.com being unavailable. Not a good thing, but always good to figure out that it is not my fault. Have not seen any explanations of what the root cause was, but as I could see MySQL was struggling pretty hard.

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!!!)

“….The file system directory in any of these disk image formats can become corrupted. This is usually as the result of an improper shutdown….”

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/fixfilevault.html

Improper shutdown my ass!!! Yesterday evening I started my rsync-script which moved about 50 GB of flac-files from our MacBook to the external disk, which I have done many times before. Also knowing that after a period of inactivty after the script have finished the Mac would do a shutdown. No problem at all. So this morning I got up and wanted to unmount the disk, but for some reason it would not accept my well known password. After a few tries I rebooted the machine and voila…no account other than the guest account was available.

Did some research during the day and realized that I would maybe have been able to get around the problem if logging in using another account and then enable root…but…using the guest account, seems impossible. Fu¤%!!

Luckily I do not think we have lost much data, but am I really pissed – YES!!! We have bought according to my standards an expensive computer with an operating system as expensive as the hardware, and then I find info saying “…disk image formats can become corrupted…”. If it had been my Linux-distro which I have costed me…zero…I could have managed, but OS X…aaaaarrrghhhh!!!

So complete reinstall seems to be the only way…shoot!!!

Based on all the good examples provided by http://groovy.codehaus.org/ I’v managed to create a Groovy script that do

• Find all elements with a name attribute prefixed with ‘DEV_’
• For all found elements, search for element with identical name attribute, but without prefix ‘DEV_’. If element found, remove it
• Create a copy of the element with the ‘DEV_’ prefix and then
  • Remove the prefix
  • Change the value of the attribute driver
  • Add the copy to the list of cars
• Write the updated XML to file

Click more to view the script. Sorry for the limited display of code in my blog.
[teaserbreak]

import groovy.xml.DOMBuilder
import groovy.xml.dom.DOMCategory
import groovy.xml.dom.DOMUtil

class CarExamples {
static def CAR_RECORDS = '''
    <records>
      <car name='HSV Maloo' make='Holden' year='2006'>
        <country>Australia</country>
        <record type='speed'>Production Pickup Truck with speed of 271kph</record>
      </car>
      <car name='P50' make='Peel' year='1962'>
        <country>Isle of Man</country>
        <record type='size'>Smallest Street-Legal Car at 99cm wide and 59 kg in weight</record>
      </car>
      <car name='Royale' make='Bugatti' year='1931'>
        <country>France</country>
        <record type='price'>Most Valuable Car at $15 million</record>
      </car>
    </records>
  '''}

def reader  = new StringReader(CarExamples.CAR_RECORDS)
def doc     = DOMBuilder.parse(reader)
def records = doc.documentElement

use (DOMCategory) {

	println "There are " + records.'*'.size() + " cars defined in the file"
    def cars = records.'car'
	println "The parent element for cars are " + cars[0].parent().getTagName()
    def dev_cars = cars.findAll{it."@name".startsWith("DEV_")}
	println " "
	dev_cars.each {
		def nameofdev = it."@name"
		println "Dev name: " + nameofdev
		def stringArr = nameofdev.split("DEV_")
		def deleteMeName = stringArr[1]
		println "Node to remove has name: " + deleteMeName
		def deleteRecord = cars.find{ it.'@name' == deleteMeName }
		if (null != deleteRecord) {
			records.removeChild(deleteRecord)
		}
		def copyOfDev = it.cloneNode(true)
		copyOfDev.setAttribute("name", deleteMeName)
		copyOfDev.setAttribute("driver", "racer")
		records.appendChild(copyOfDev)
		println "\n"
	}
}

outputFile = new File("resultfile.xml")
outputFile.write(DOMUtil.serialize(records))

Trying out Groovy on my laptop running Windows XP and kept getting the errormessage:

error: could not find client or server jvm under C:\apps\IBM\SDP\jdk\bin
please check that it is a valid jdk / jre containing the desired type of jvm

JAVA_HOME was set, tried to add the path to the jdk, but still did not help. Then found the solution at …startup-error-….html. Problem was that when issuing the command ‘groovy’ alone it runs the groovy.exe, but the .exe-file does not handle the paths correct for some reason. Running groovy.bat fixes the problem since it handles the paths correctly.

My previous post with almost the same title “What caused my svn checksum mismatch problem described the root cause to my problem, the perl search/replace command, but I did not understand what why the perl command

perl -pi -e ‘s#ojdbc14_10.2.0.2.jar#ojdbc6_11.1.0.7.0.jar#g’ `find . | grep jdbc.xml`

created the svn mismatch-problem. Thanks to input from Geir Sjurseth we got it figured out. Should really have figured it out by myself, but as many times before, I’m blind to the solution and need someone just to get me to view the problem from another angle, then the solution is as easy to find as the sun on the sky (or whatever analogy would be appropriate).

The problem is the
`find . | grep jdbc.xml`
command which would also change jdbc.xml-files in the .svn-folders. Changing the entire command to for instance
find . -name jdbc.xml -exec perl -pi -e ‘s#ojdbc14_10.2.0.2.jar#ojdbc6_11.1.0.7.0.jar#g’ {} \;
solves the whole problem. -exec is also preferable I’ve learned since that would not create a child process (fork)

vi + name of file
shift + G (Goto last line in VI)
o (insert after line in VI)
Middle mouse button (paste in X-WIN32)
ESC (quit insert mode in VI)
shift + ZZ (Save and exit in VI)
…next file, times 140
All because SVN looses control when using perl search/replace

Good thing that I have Spotify and can use the time to get to know “Darkness on the edge of town”