Tom's blog

I was watching heroes season 3, playing with the unlock schema of my phone (Android(1.6) HTC Magic) drawing strange pattern until I locked it down. The phone shows a message : wait 30 seconds until next try (translated from french). I did hit by mistake the recovery button which lead me to a login form asking me for username and password to unlock the device. My phone is set-up with my google apps account 'login'@mansonthomas.com. I've tryed everything and it fails to unlock telling me 'wrong username or password'... For example I've tryed : login@mansonthomas.com, login, my other gmail address with and without the @gmail.com... I've googled and find why it won't works : Apparently, the phone needs a wifi internet connection so that the login/password check passes. It's plausible as the login failure is instantaneous while it should take some time to check your password over the internet through a 3G connection it's said here by l...

I've purchased a year and a half ago a NAS from Thecus . It's the N4100Pro model which you can see on the right. The purpose of this post is to tell how I'm satisfied with my Thecus NAS ! It's so rare that the product is good and the support by the company is so good that It needs to be shout ! ;) Usually, what you can read on internet is complains, issue... Here it's just about satisfaction ! First, the installation and setup was easy, the features was here and working. Ok it's what I've paid for... But I've been quite surprised that Thecus was actually updating the firmware and adding functionality regularly which gives some new functionality, new user interface. Just compare this situation to Sony :  I've bought a laptop half a year ago, with windows vista. I've upgrade to windows 7 :  they offer no support for windows 7 at all for my laptop. No driver, no help. The result : My laptop battery hold 1 hour max. The ...

When you update your ubuntu to 10.04, the upgrade process forgets to update the bacula database which ends with this in bacula logs : 02-May 17:39 bacula-dir JobId 0: Fatal error: Version error for database "bacula". Wanted 12, got 10 02-May 17:39 bacula-dir JobId 0: Fatal error: Could not open Catalog "MyCatalog", database "bacula". 02-May 17:39 bacula-dir JobId 0: Fatal error: Version error for database "bacula". Wanted 12, got 10 02-May 17:39 bacula-dir ERROR TERMINATION Please correct configuration file: /etc/bacula/bacula-dir.conf to correct this you need to run manuall two SQL scripts to upgrade the database (extracted from sources of bacula). First you need to edit ~/.my.cnf so that 'mysql' command use this file to connect to the database : [client] user=root password=YOU_MYSQL_ROOT_PWD_HERE protocol=tcp or change the scripts so that this line : if $bindir/mysql $* -f <<END-OF-DATA is changed to this line : if...

  Since ubuntu 10.04, Sun JDK has been dropped and replaced by openjdk . Literally replaced, ie : Sun JDK remove, openjdk installed. This is performed during the upgrade without explicitly asking you for your consent... which is quite ugly... After the upgrade, my tomcat was not working anymore... Anyway, in order to install Sun JDK back you just have to : vi /etc/apt/sources.list and check if the following line is present : deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner if not, add it at the end of the file. then run sudo aptitude update to get the package list from the new repo. and then run : sudo aptitude install sun-java6-jdk but after that, if you run java -version, it's still the openjdk version. thomas@daisybox:/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun$ java -version java version "1.6.0_18" OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.8) (6b18-1.8-0ubuntu1) OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.0-b16, mixed mode) thomas@daisybox:/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun$ which java /usr/...

Today I was by a client to proceed on a delicate TIBCO iProcess upgrade, and I encounter a strange issue : Oracle Universal Installer (9.2.0.1 or 10.2.0.1) won't launch. If you watch in process explorer , you can see a java process (javaw.exe) launch and die. I found out that it was the default 'temp' (or tmp) directory that was preventing Oracle Universal Installer to launch. On this particular machine, the default setting is : %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Temp which is expanded to (+ oracle path) : C:\Documents and Settings\matr1x!\Local Settings\Temp\OraInstall2010-05-11_10-08-17AM\jre\bin I've replaced TEMP and TMP environment variable value by 'c:\temp' and I was able to launch the Oracle Installer and perform the installation. (using C:\Install\Oracle\client 9i\92010NT_Disk1\install\win32\setup.exe, C:\Install\Oracle\client 9i\92010NT_Disk1\setup.exe still wasn't working)

I've been using this calendar to have week number in google calendar :  http://sites.google.com/site/gcalweeknumbers/googlecalendarweeknumbers But since a few weeks it fails to load. I try to re-add it without success from the webpage. I managed to make it work again by tweaking the url : https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/ GOOGLEAPPSDOMAIN.COM /render?cid=g0k1sv1gsdief8q28kvek83ps4@group.calendar.google.com replace GOOGLEAPPSDOMAIN.COM by your google apps domain name, paste the link in a browser that have a google apps session open, it will ask for comfirmation before adding this calendar to your calendar, click yes and you have weeks number back in your caledar!

I've recently reinstalled my SONY VAIO laptop (VGN-SZ71E/B) with Windows 7 (with dual boot with Ubuntu 9.10, see this howto from lifehacker ). When I try to install the last nvidia drivers I get this error : "nVidia setup program could not locate any drivers that are compatible with your current hardware. Setup will now exit." So I tried the driver finder from nvdia download page , which one told me that the manufacturer (i.e. SONY) requires that the driver should be downloaded from their website. So I get to the Sony support page to get their last driver... I was a bit disappointed by the experience : They only propose the original driver which is as old as prehistory (November 2007) and 32bit while my windows 7 is 64bit. After a google search, I've found laptopvideo2go website which provide a decently recent drivers (v190, July of 2009, while the last from nvidia is v195) and a modified INF file that allow the driver to install on your laptop. Go there...

On linux, you can tune the way the system use the swap via the 'swappiness' parameter. Check how the swap is used on your machine: You can print how the system is using the swap with the vmstat command : thomas@home:~$ vmstat 2 procs -----------memory---------- --- swap -- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu---- r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 0 0 25192 81956 93052 2383988 0 0 8 15 1 1 1 1 98 0 6 0 25192 71076 93100 2384224 0 0 10 272 1148 1265 8 10 80 2 0 0 25192 97492 93016 2368148 0 0 132 1186 1380 1845 26 35 39 0 0 0 25192 96648 93032 2368740 0 0 70 188 1121 1066 2 2 96 1 0 0 25192 96400 93044 2368976 0 0 0 188 1117 1082 1 1 98 0 the '2' parameter stands for the refresh time in seconds. si stands for Swap IN (byte written to the swap) so stands for Swap OUT (byte removed from the swap) On a server which has enough...

Today I need to purge my bacula for several reasons. Here is how I did. First backup the database and files used in your previous setup, one never knows you might actually need it after the purge... /usr/bin/mysqldump -aecqQ bacula > bacula_before_purge.sql and copy the volumes and bsr files. Stop bacula : service bacula-director stop service bacula-fd stop service bacula-sd stop then : mysql -u root -p drop database bacula; create database bacula; quit next we need to recreate bacula tables. There's a bacula script to do that, but the file needs to be changed to set the correct database name. cp /usr/share/bacula-director/make_mysql_tables ~/ vi ~/make_mysql_tables change XXX_DBNAME_XXX by your bacula database (let's say 'bacula') save and exit. then run as root the script ~/make_mysql_tables it should have recreated the tables : mysql -u root -p use bacula; show tables; +------------------+ | Tables_in_bacula | +-----------...

I've rent a new server by dedibox.fr and the ubuntu server version is tunned by the dedibox team... On the Ubuntu Server 9.04 64bit/english version, there's a locale configuration issue. whenever you do a aptitude update or run the 'locale' command you get a warning like this : thomas@sd1:~$ locale locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-15 LANGUAGE=en_US:en:en_GB:en LC_CTYPE="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_NUMERIC="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_TIME="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_COLLATE="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_MONETARY="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_MESSAGES="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_PAPER="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_NAME="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_ADDRESS="en_US.ISO-8859-15" LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.ISO-8859-15" L...