Shortest iron manual

This is the shortest ironing HOWTO I've ever heard - a friend of mine told me this when I mentioned that I hadn't used my new iron yet, since I had wanted to read the manual first (it's not that I don't know how to use an iron; I just usually read manuals):

An iron had two ends - one of them is a plug and the other is hot.

:)

Normalizing tracks when burning Audio CD's with K3b

K3b currently does not support normalizing when writing on the fly, so, if you installed normalize-audio application, and 'Normalize volume levels' option is still inactive, make sure that 'On the fly' option is unchecked.

How to install lame on Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger)

If you want to install lame encoder using Synaptic or apt-get, you should add the following two lines to /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary multiverse

Ubuntu unstable due to BIOS settings

Just a quick & dirty note this time.

These settings caused my machine to be unstable.

CHIPSET
FSB:  166 MHz
RAM
freq: 199 MHz (DDR 398)
CAS:  3-3-3-8

Various applications (for example, Firefox, Synaptic, GNU Gadu) and both GNOME and KDE environments crashed because of segmentation faults or unknown reasons. Memtest86 detected RAM errors during moving inversions test.

With these settings everything seems to be working fine:

CHIPSET
FSB:  166 MHz
RAM
freq: 166 MHz (DDR 332)
CAS:  2.5-3-3-7

UPDATE:

A friend of mine has sent an e-mail to tell me that this post might be a little confusing. So to make things clear:

• The problem described above was caused only by wrong BIOS settings and it was by no means Ubuntu's fault.
• The above RAM timings are useful only for me; this blog is, among other things, also my notepad, so I will sometimes jot down things like this.

Ubuntu & fonts (yet again)

I've just found a nice way of installing Microsoft's TrueType core fonts on Ubuntu without using msttcorefonts package.

You can read about it in post #9 of this thread.

A basic museekd init.d script for Ubuntu

You should change the values of MUSEEKD_USER and MUSEEKD_CONFIG variables so they fit your system.

#! /bin/sh

# Written by chopeen
#
# Based on SeeSchloss' museek & mulog init.d scripts for Gentoo 
# <http://seeschloss.org/museek/>

MUSEEKD_USER=foobar
MUSEEKD_CONFIG=/home/foobar/.museekd/config.xml
MUSEEKD_PATH=/usr/local/bin

case "$1" in
start)
echo "Starting museekd as user $MUSEEKD_USER"
start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --exec $MUSEEKD_PATH/museekd \
  --chuid $MUSEEKD_USER --background --pidfile /var/run/museekd.pid \
  --make-pidfile -- -c $MUSEEKD_CONFIG
;;
stop)
echo "Stopping museekd"
start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile /var/run/museekd.pid
;;
esac

exit 0

Beware of Replace functions!

If you are using VB.NET and want to replace all occurrences of one string in a variable with another string, you can use either Replace function from Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace (which is, unfortunately, imported by default in every new VB project and you cannot even see this in the code!) or Replace function from String class (and this is a preferred method).

I was absolutely sure that the following snippets of code would give the same results:

Dim s1 As String = ""
s1 = Replace(s1, "foo", "fee")

Dim s2 As String = ""
s2 = s2.Replace("foo", "fee")

Well, they don't. While the variable s2 remains to be an empty string, s1 is set to Nothing. That's something worth remembering.

Problems with X server

After an upgrade Ubuntu 5.04 to 5.10 my machine became unstable - GNOME started to crash at random, for no apparent reason.

I looked around for a while and the I found messages like the one below written to syslog by the gdm process:

gdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0

I tried using KDE instead of GNOME, but that didn't help.

I installed kdm and set it as a default display manager. That didn't help either, but the messages changed to:

X server for display :0 terminated unexpectedly

I did some reading and came to a conclusion that a display manager is not really necessary, so I uninstalled both gde and kde. It feels like an ugly hack to me and I don't a have a graphical login screen, but the system seems to be stable.

Special Polish characters in KDE applications

If special Polish characters are not displayed correctly in KDE applications, configure them to use Verdana instead of Helvetica.

You can also change the fonts used by the system using Kcontrol, if you are using KDE.

I am not sure, if system language settings affect this. I am almost 100% sure that there is a better way to solve this problem, but this one's quick & simple.

I've found it here.

Visual Studio add-ins and .NET tools

Just a few links today:

• Ten Essential Tools Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now
My favourite add-in described in this article is Smart Paster - it is really useful if one is creating a lot of SQL queries in Query Analyzer and then pasting them into Visual Studio, like I do.
• Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now
This article was published more than a year ago, but it's still worth reading. I used almost every tool described here.
• XML Visualizer
  
And this is a how-did-I-live-without-it tool. It allows to view data in various XML-backed data sources (for example, DataSet and DataTable variables) while debugging.