OSX Installer to PL2303 Serial-USB on OSX Lion - For programming Baofeng radios

While trying to get the programming cable for my Baofeng UV-3R+ I found the site below.  I tried the Prolific drivers, but they did not work properly on my system.  I also tried several other drives with no success.  The odd thing is that I could see the driver detecting the device from System Information:

Once the drivers were installed and the system rebooted I was able to see the serial device under networking settings:

Now CHIRP is happy and able to detect the serial port where my radio is located:

Web link to page with the drivers PL-2303

Direct link to PL2303 OSX Lion Driver

How to stop Datanucleus Enhancer Console Output from stealing focus in Eclipse

How to stop Datanucleus Enhancer Console Output from stealing focus in Eclipse

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You might find that when using the Datanucleus Enhancer that every time you make a change to your project that requires a build to occur that the Datanucleus Enhancer will run.  When this happens Eclipse will change focus to the console window (which can be annoying if you already have another tab selected like ‘Development Mode’).

To change this setting you only need to go into Eclipse Preferences and make a couple of changes.

Open Eclipse Preferences and search for ‘Console’:

Uncheck the option ‘Show when program writes to standard out’.  You can also choose to not allow the Eclipse console from stealing focus when errors are written to the console by unchecking the ‘Show when program writes to standard error’ if you choose.

References:

Bug 108597 - Console view keeps stealing the focus

Tomcat 6 availability issue in Hyperic

I have recently started using Hyperic to monitor services on several servers and ran into a problem with two different servers where I needed to monitor Tomcat 6.0 availability on a Windows 2003 platform. Turns out the problem was the service query to find the process in Windows was not able to find the Tomcat process like it should have. Thanks to the support forum question and answer below I was able to fix my problem.  Basically I had to change the process.query in Hyperic for the Tomcat service to be Pid.Service.eq=Service name (in this case Tomcat6).

Support Forums : Tomcat 6 availability issue ...

How to Modify eclipse.ini settings in Mac OS X

How to Modify eclipse.ini settings in Mac OS X

Right click on your Eclipse icon and choose the option ‘Show Package Contents’


Open ‘Contents’ and then ‘MacOS’.  Then you should be able to select eclipse.ini and open it with your favorite text editor.



You can then edit things like the JVM version and your memory settings

Here is a link with more ideas on making Eclipse run great on OS X

How to setup open JDK on Mac OS X in Eclipse

Open Eclipse preferences and go to the installed JREs

Click the ‘Add...’ a new one, and browse to the base of the JDK,  in this example /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines.  You will see an error message that you have not selected a target that is a JDK root.

Manually type in the last part of the JRE home (/1.7.0.jdk/Contents/home).
How do you know the final part of the path?  The 1.7.0.jdk is the file name of the JDK. The rest of the path can be found by right clicking on the 1.7.0.jdk in finder and select ‘Show package Contents’ then go find the home folder


You should probably see something like this when you Show the Package Contents:

Finally You should be able to give you JDK a name and click the ‘Finish’ button

Running Apache Tomcat on Mac OSX

Here is a great link for getting Apache Tomcat setup to run easily on Mac OSX.

Once you download Tomcat and extract the files from the zip there are a couple of things you need to do from a terminal in the tomcat/bin folder:

chmod 755 *.sh 



You might also want to delete the *.bat files because you cannot use them anyway:

rm *.bat

There is also a nice shell script in the link above that will let you start and stop tomcat by typing in 'tomcat start' or 'tomcat stop' from a terminal window.

Setup environment variables in Mac OS when using Eclipse

While trying to get Eclipse Ant builds working on Mac OS I found that I needed to setup environment variables.  Normally in Linux and Windows I knew how to do this, however things are a little different on the Mac.
Using help from this link I was able to add the appropriate variables that I needed to run my Ant builds in Eclipse.
Basically from a terminal you would use the following command:
sudo vi /etc/launchd.conf


Then add add entries as necessary:

setenv GWT_HOME /Users/hathaway3/eclipse/plugins/com.google.gwt.eclipse.sdkbundle.2.1.0_2.1.0.v201010280102/gwt-2.1.0

setenv GWT_INCUBATOR /Users/hathaway3/eclipse/plugins/com.google.gwt.eclipse.sdkbundle.2.1.0_2.1.0.v201010280102/gwt-2.1.0


The only bad thing is that you must reboot after making these changes.

Changing windows proxy to be either system or user based

Today I was trying to figure out how to change windows to use the proxy setting on a machine basis rather then by user. This registry key setting is supposed to be the 'key'.

System Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\

Internet Settings]

Value Name: ProxySettingsPerUser

Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value)

Value Data: (0 = whole machine, 1 = per user)

Windows Schedule Jobs won't run if path has special characters - solved

While trying to trouble shoot an issue with a scheduled task on a Windows 2003 server I found a few interesting things to keep in mind.

1. Windows XP machines have the windows scheduler log file located under c:\windows\SchedLgU.Txt - This is not the case with Windows 2003 server. To view the log file on a Windows 2003 server run the following command %SystemRoot%\Tasks\SchedLgU.txt

2. If you attempt to call a batch file from your scheduled job that is under a path name that includes a special character like the ampersand (&) it will not run. You will need to move your batch file into a folder that does not have the ampersand anywhere in the path.

Here is an example:

c:\a&b\batch-file.bat - this file will work if you double click the file in Windows explorer, but it will not work as a scheduled task.

move the file to a folder without an &:

c:\batch-file.bat - This file will now execute properly as a scheduled task.

According to this link the reason is that a windows cmd will process as a separation of two commands. So the scheduled task trys to run 'c:\a' and also 'b\batch-file.bat'. Neither of these files exist, so the scheduled job will not run.

Search and replace text in multiple files quickly

I had the need to quickly update the same string within several HTML files.  Rather then open each file and do a global search and replace on the string I decided to see if there were any tools on the internet that could speed this process.  After a little googling I found a tool called TextCrawler.  

I had a list of over 30 strings to find and replace in 8 different files.  I was able to make the changes quickly using this tool.

Text Crawler is freeware, so download it and give it a try.

How to move files between vmware ESXi servers

Today I had to move files between two ESXi servers.

I was looking for a simple tool that could copy from one server to another.  At first I thought the only way move the files would be to use VMware Infrastructure Client to copy the files to my PC and then move the files from my PC back to the other VMware server.  Using Veeam Backup and FastSCP I was able to move the files between servers without actually copying them locally to my PC.  Their tool is free to download and use.

I decided to Google 'filter rss feeds' today. Seems there are several tools out there to do the task. The one that really caught my eye is Yahoo pipes. I had seen pipes before, but never really thought about what it could do for me. I played around some with Pipes to filter a feed. Next up - combining feeds with Yahoo Pipes.

Wordpress plugin for social bookmarking

I found a Blog today that used Wordpress with some neat features. I liked the fact that it offers social bookmarking sites. I have been using Feedburner with Blogger to accomplish this on most of my blogs. The thing I was unsure of is how to make this happen with Wordpress. This plugin Sociable looks really slick.

How to get the best rankings on your blog

This was an interesting article on how to get the highest rankings in your blog. It is specific to wordpress blogs, but the same techniques can be used on any blogging platform.

Share a post - find content to post to a blog

I stumbled across a site today called sharepost.com that has content that you can grab and post to a blog. I think it would be more interesting to actually write you own content to post to your blog, but hey it is something I had never heard about before.

Google AJAX Search API Wizards - Google AJAX Search API - Google Code

Google AJAX Search API Wizards - Google AJAX Search API - Google Code: "Google AJAX Search API Wizards"
I found this today while searching around. There is a wizard that allows you to create an AJAX news bar and place it on your web site. I am sure there will be more wizards to come in the future.

If you own a Linksys WRT54G3G and you are having problems then please keep reading. I have worked for a couple of months now to figure out why my router and my Pantech PX-500 card would not work properly together. I was already running Linksys 2.00.9 firmware and my Pantech card also had the most recent firmware. My router would not stay connected, would not auto connect all the time, and just overall was very unreliable. After upgrading my router with OpenWRT Firmware I was able to finally have a reliable internet connection.
Please see this thread below for information on where to find the OpenWRT firmware and how to install the new firmware on your router.

OpenWRT Firmware for WRT54G3G- New Aug. 25th : EVDOforums.com

Update: 12/16/2008
If you are looking to purchase one of these great routers I would check eBay. I just purchased one shipped for under $60

After purchasing a Sprint broadband card I wanted to see if there was a way to make it work with Ubuntu Linux. After lots of searching I found a document on Sprints web site that details the steps required to get their broadband cards working. The card I purchased was the Pantech PX-500. I am using Ubuntu 7.04, so the instructions were a little different. I had no need to configure the modem for graphical access, I just wanted a simple script I could run to share broadband using my old Linux laptop.
Here are the steps I followed to get the card working:

1. Follow the steps on pages 21-22 of the Sprint guide.
2. Setup masquerading on your Linux box. I used the command "sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.1.0/24 -o ppp0 -j MASQUERADE". This will be different depending on your network configuration.
   
3. And the final step that was somewhat hard to figure out was to setup IP forwarding. This was the magic trick to completing the whole setup "sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1". There appears to be several ways to make this work, but using sysctl was the only way I could make it work with my specific configuration.
4. Bring up your connection with "sudo wvdial" and enjoy!

LucidDB Home Page

LucidDB Home Page

Column type databases are a very interesting idea. LucidDB is an open source database that claims to be much faster than a row based database.

opencsv - an open source csv parser for Java

opencsv - an open source csv parser for Java