Crash logging Opera with Inspector IIXII for Linux

For those of you interested, I’ve spent a bit of my time trying to make your crashing logging life easier. icon wink Crash logging Opera with Inspector IIXII for Linux

After reading a post from csant‘s blog I decided to try to make the process of starting up Inspector a little less annoying by writing a Bourne shell script to automatically parse the PID and execute Inspector with the proper PID parameter for Opera.

After taking what csant had already posted (and is posted in a couple of other places) I just did a little extending that narrowed down the results to the correct one and parsed the second element divided by whitespace, which has to be the PID. It’s a fairly simple script. icon wink Crash logging Opera with Inspector IIXII for Linux

To get started crash logging Opera to help make it better all you need to do is download the Inspector program and create a new file named “inspectr.sh”.

Notice that I named it “inspectr” intentionally, as the linux program file is and has always been just “inspectr” so this helps keep confusion between file names down.

In the new shell file that you’ve created, copy and paste the following and save it.

#!/bin/sh

opera=`ps aux | grep opera$ | awk '{print $2}'`
if [ "$opera" != "" ]; then
./inspectr $opera
fi

After saving it, you’ll need to run the following to make it executable.

chmod +x inspectr.sh

Make sure that you saved both of the files together and also followed the instructions for setting up Inspector (really just chmod 755). After that you can just pop open a terminal, navigate to the inspector directory and run the following command to attach Inspector to the current running version of Opera.

./inspectr.sh

That’s about it! Collect those logs and make sure to send them with your bug reports!

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The day the Music Died..in Ruckus

ruckus_shield

ruckus shield 150x150 The day the Music Died..in RuckusRuckus, which was once a source of free music in a legal way of obtaining it and was based on advertisements. The way that I was introduced to Ruckus was through my University and I found it to be a pretty good service even with the DRM protected content.

Over the weekend, however, I found that upon visiting Ruckus.net I was greeted with an “Unfortunately the Ruckus Service will no longer be provided” message.

At first I thought I must be at the wrong website, maybe a fake one. Nope, it’s true and it was for me without warning.

Oddly enough, I had just used the service on February 5 and it turned out that the very next day they closed their doors.

For those of you who spend a lot of time building a DRM protected library in Ruckus, I’m sorry to say that your music will slowly become unplayable. Your best bet is to find an alternative or get to cracking that protection as soon as possible. icon wink The day the Music Died..in Ruckus

I turned to a service that I had looked into in the past, but never got around to trying. SpiralFrog will hopefully be a good replacement to Ruckus for me, but so far I’ve been disappointed to say the least with their song and artist selection of available for download tracks.

Another thing that I dislike about SpiralFrog is the fact that the download manager seems to only handle one song at a time and is fairly poor at doing even that!

Ruckus was capable of downloading multiple tracks at once and downloaded them very fast through the client which was a download manager and player all in one (a long with the advertisements).

ruckus client 300x225 The day the Music Died..in Ruckus

Are there any other good alternatives that I should look into that are legal and free?

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WordPress 2.7.1 Released

A revision update to WordPress 2.7 has been released today with 68 fixed tickets!

As usual I immediately upgraded my version of WordPress. The upgrade is now as simple as Clicking an upgrade button and ta-da!

If you want to upgrade your version of WordPress 2.7 to 2.7.1, then just open your WordPress admin section. Under the “Tools” menu you will find an “Upgrade” option. Click “Upgrade” and on the next page just click to automatically upgrade!

It is still suggested that you backup your database, however, I ran into no problems during my upgrade process and the entire upgrade took approximately 5 seconds.

For those of you using a version of WordPress prior to 2.7, you will not have the luxury of a built-in automatic update, but you can still use a plugin to automatically upgrade for you. Just make sure to deactivate the plugin later if you intend to use the built-in upgrade tool in the future, otherwise you will see a message similar to the following when attempting to upgrade:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class pclzip in /../wp-admin/includes/class-pclzip.php on line 171

Enjoy the easy upgrade tool and WordPress 2.7.1!

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UNIX: 1234567890 on Friday Feb. 13, 2009 @ 18:31:30

This coming Friday the 13th (ahhhh, bad luck!!!!) will be a unique day for me and everyone on earth!

This coming Friday the 13th will be the day that makes a milestone mark in the history of UNIX! That milestone has been running since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of January 1, 1970, not counting leap seconds.

Basically, if you live if Eastern Standard Time (EST) like I do, then you will see this once in a life time event occur on:

Fri Feb 13 18:31:30 2009

Here is a quick screen shot that illustrates how to find the local time for you as well as the local time for me. icon wink UNIX: 1234567890 on Friday Feb. 13, 2009 @ 18:31:30

02 300x198 UNIX: 1234567890 on Friday Feb. 13, 2009 @ 18:31:30

If you want to check the time in your location then enter the following terminal command (compliments of  Gizmodo.com).

perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";'

Enjoy the day and maybe down a brew to celebrate the unique timing! Go UNIX!

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