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.

Installing VMware Workstation on Ubuntu

When installing VMware on Ubuntu (and other Linux distros too, I think) from a compressed tar archive (for example, VMware-workstation-5.5.0-18463.tar.gz), make sure to change the directory to the root of an unpacked tarball, so you can start the installation by typing ./vmware-install.pl. Otherwise, the setup process will fail.

I had a problem installing VMware 5.5.0 and I found the solution here.

Transaction isolation levels in Oracle Database

There's an interesting article about transaction isolation levels in the last issue (November/December 2005) of Oracle Magazine - On Transaction Isolation Levels by Tom Kyte.

Being a SQL Server guy who has to use NOLOCK all the time, I was surprised to learn that there is no READ UNCOMITTED isolation level in Oracle Database. And here's the explanation how it is solved:

When the query I'm executing gets to the block containing the locked row (row 342,023) at the bottom of the table, it will notice that the data in it has changed since execution began. To provide a consistent, or correct, answer, Oracle Database will create a copy of the block containing this row as it existed when the query began. That is, it will read a value of $100, which is the value that existed when the query began. Effectively, Oracle Database takes a detour around the modified data—it reads around it, reconstructing it from the undo (also known as a rollback) segment. A consistent and correct answer comes back without waiting for the transaction to commit.

Nice.

Upgrading Ubuntu 5.04 to 5.10 (in, increasingly inaccurately named, 3 easy steps)

All you have to do to upgrade Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog) to 5.10 (Breezy Badger) is:

1. Start Synaptic Package Manager.
2. Go to Settings / Repositories.
3. Change Distribution from hoary to breezy for every Ubuntu repository (example).
4. Close the Repositories window; the package information will be automatically reloaded.
5. Press Mark All Upgrades button and choose Smart Update.

That's all - Synaptic Package Manager will download all the needed packages and install them.

VS 2005 Beta 2 - cannot create a new project or open an existing one

I have been using Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2005 for a few weeks and one day, completely out of the blue it failed to open my project. I tried to open another one - the same result. I also couldn't create a new project.

Unfortunately, I didn't jot down the error message, but I remember it mentioned Microsoft.Common.targets file.

I checked this file on my machine and it turned out that it was empty. I did some googling to make sure that it is not normal and then reinstalled .NET Framework 2.0 (use repair option) - it helped!