Scary place

The place where I live is really a scary place. My friends have pointed the same a number of times, but i always ignored. As they say you dont believe till you see it. So the story is that my friends always advised me to go home early but I always ignored. So, I was returning from office yesterday around 9:30pm and since my flatty wasn't there so i was riding a rickshaw. To kill time, I called a BigV, and we started discussing Indian cricket team's position and Sachin's great innning. And suddenly a bike rushed behind me, I felt a hand trying to snatch my phone. Thank God, I instinctively grabbed my phone harder and the bike rushed past me. It took me couple of moments to realize what has happened. This was my new phone only 1 month old, I was so afraid that I shut the phone down and thanked my stars again. Also I vowed never to talk in a rickshaw again and try to return home as early as possible.
P.S. I am writing this post using my cell that just survived the snatching attempt.

Flexbuilder on Linux

After migrating my desktop to ubuntu, biggest hurdle was of setting up flex builder on it. This was really an ordeal but the good news is that thanks to google, at last its done!!!

I will try to recapture what all I did to achieve this milestone....
1. Get Eclipse Europa, which is pretty easy. One can use later versions of Eclipse as well
2. Download Flex builder for linux (http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flexbuilder_linux.html), again easy step
3. Follow the instructions available at Adobe Labs site (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/) these are very straight forward.. no issues till now.
4. Everything so far is fun, and flexbuilder is running hooray....

First thing after installation is to set up flex debugger... ooops.. after bit of googling it came down to..
1. Uninstall currently installed flashplayer.
2. Download most recent debug flashplayer for linux form http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html.
3. install the debug player and we are done.

Now comes AIR, how to do this one....
1. I tried to run/debug an AIR application using sfk 3.0.0 as bundled with flex builder ... "This application requires a version of the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) which is no longer supported. Please contact the application author for an updated version."
2. Googled it and I reached http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/releasenotes.html#air.
3. It asked me to download the latest air sdk from http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=airsdk
4. Followed the instruction as they were word by word... previous error was gone but now you get "flex_sdk_3/bin/adl_lin: 1: Syntax error: word unexpected (expecting ")") "
5. There is a bug on for the same (https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FBE-323)
6. After much googling I resolved the problem by renaming adl and adt to adl_lin and adt_lin and placing it in sdk/3.0.0/bin.

So here are my steps to upgrade AIR SDK
Follow these simple steps to upgrade the SDK used by Flex Builder Linux on your machine:

* Download latest Adobe AIR SDK.
* Go to the sdks/3.0.0/ folder (in the Flex Builder installation directory).
* Delete the "runtimes" folder.
* Extract the latest Adobe AIR SDK and copy its contents into sdks/3.0.0/, overwriting existing files.
* Go to latest AIRSDK bin folder and rename adl and adt as adl_lin and adt_lin, copy these files to sdks/3.0.0/bin/.
* Go to sdks/3.0.0/runtimes/air/ and create a symlink "Linux" pointing to the "linux" folder in the same directory.


At last AIR ran, what a relief. I also encountered air runtime exception "invocation forwarded to primary instance", To resolve this just kill adl process.

Colorful tail

Well I use tail a lot to monitor my jboss logs. On windows/wine I use this great utility 'BareTail' to monitor logs where I can color code tags like Exception, Error, Warning and so on.. This is visually very appealing.
In plain tail command you you actually need to scan the whole log to get to error. So I was looking to color code tail and guess what it is pretty easy to do by using perl.

tail -n 1000 -f file name | perl -pe 's/.*Exception.*/\e[0;31;33m$&\e[0m/g'

This is so cool and this thing goes to .bashrc so now I have baretail like visually appealing tail :)

Moving to Jaunty Jackalope

My upgrade manager was prompting from some time about Ubuntu's new release 9.04. So last week I decide to go ahead and install it. The upgrade process was really smooth and no hard work for me. All the packages were downloaded and I was informed about the my configurations. Bottom line everything was neat.

After the upgrade process, I was told that Upgrade is successful and I need to reboot. So I rebooted the machine. Now comes the twist in the tale, On restart the whole screen garbled out like early 80's DD when there was no signal. There was no login screen nothing just strange color patterns. This was really scary because I did not have any backup and though this is a dual boot machine and I can recover data easily, but just the thought of reverting back to XP and reinstalling ubuntu would be a real pain.

After contemplating for half an hour, I decide to give a shot to ubuntu forums. Within 6 minutes of posting my query(http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1186225), I got the reply and after 30 min of exercise Jaunty Jackalope was up and running on my m/c. What an awesome feeling.

A zillion thanks to ubuntu forums and by god they are quick. You get a response almost instantaneously. Kudos to ubuntu community.

SAD

United lost...