Ana's Lair: February 2007

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

online stopwatch

Do you need a stopwatch as soon as possible? simply open a new tab and go to http://tools.arantius.com/stopwatch then simply push the Start button.

changing useragent in Opera and Firefox

Before Opera 9.x it was easy to change useragent since all was in properties->advanced->network->browser identification. But now it seems much unconfortable, since you can change only for the site you are visiting, so you go to Tools->Quick Preferences->Edit site preferences->network->browser identification.
So whenever you use some sites which redirect you to another..you get into trouble since you have to manually change every time and also the identification it seems not to work so well, I mean I am still detected as running opera on some tests.

In Firefox it's easier and more effective: You simply type in URL: about:config and then you search for general.useragent.override. If you dont find it, you must create it: right click and select new string. Then you can add a value for it like :Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR
1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) or whatever identification you want.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

godaddy total dns control problems

Today I wanted to change some DNS settings for one of my domains and I got this error:
The Total DNS Control Manager for this domain is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later.

I called them, they said nothing is wrong, and to clear cookies..blabla. So it seems like a browser problem, I was using firefox, I tried with Opera, I got some error clearily saying they dont support opera. Then I used the Firefox from another computer and it worked...very weird.

Sunday, February 04, 2007

payoneer card and plimus

After I decided to use plimus as my payments processor, I logged in and took a look to some options. I was surprised to see how easy is to integrate payment buttons in a html page and how easy is to create recurring payments or templates. Also it's good that plimus give the option for a possible customer to use paypal as payment. Then I looked at payout options and saw the ATM card option: Payoneer. First I thought it's too good to be true. I ordered such card, it didn't cost me anything, it was quickly delivered then I was able to use it at the ATM to withdraw money. It is like epassporte somehow, but it is easier to get. More payments processors and even affiliate programs should start to use payoneer.

Smartdrive (smartdrv.exe)

The smartdrv.exe is an external command available in MSDOS. So whenever you boot with your recovery disk or whenever you don't actually run windows and you are in the command promt, you need to load smartdrv.exe for faster disk access. It will highly improve the speed of searching for files or deleting big directories. After Windows is loaded, such things are handles by the windows itself so you no longer need external programs like smartdrive.

generated by webalizer version 2.01

After I published my webalizer stats, I got many visits from string searches such as "generated by webalizer 2.01". I wonder why people search this? My guess is they want to do refererspam?

Saturday, February 03, 2007

What means Ederlezi?

Probably anyone listened to Goran Bregovic. There is a good song called "Ederlezi"(Ederleji). It seems to mean some kind of major holiday for Rroms. The return of the spring when Rroms celebrates and decorates their houses with flowers. Anyone know more details?

Friday, February 02, 2007

JBoss: Hypersonic to mysql migration

So, now I had my server, deploying the trailbalzer

and even my application without any problems, but as there's already stated that Hypersonic isn't suited for production purposes and as I discovered that my tables were gone when restarting the server (only after some more hours I understoof it wasn't Hypersonic's fault, but a xml config file's), I decided to change to mySQL as a datasource for my applications using JBoss's services. Easy said...looking in a few
pages/articles/threads on this subject, the only thing I got to be sure about was
that there was no two opinions alike. And only for the 4.0.5 version, as I was careful not to read outdated info...Did those people offering advice really set their data source to mySQL? I guess I'll never know. Bottom line, none of the guides I'd found provided the complete solution to my problem, mainly all of them said the follwong things:

1.Download and set to the classpath the mysql driver (mysql-connector-java-5.0.4-bin.jar),
then copy this to [jboss-location]/server/default/lib directory.

2.Create a file named mysql-ds.xml in the
[jboss-location]/server/default/deploy/ directory and edit it similar
to
the example (my actual
file):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>






<datasources>
<local-tx-datasource>
<jndi-name>MySqlDS</jndi-name>

<connection-url>jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/OPA</connection-url>

<driver-class>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</driver-class>
<user-name>A_USER_NAME</user-name>
<password>A_PASSWORD</password>
<min-pool-size>5</min-pool-size>
<max-pool-size>20</max-pool-size>
<idle-timeout-minutes>5</idle-timeout-minutes>

<exception-sorter-class-name>org.jboss.resource.adapter.jdbc.vendor.MySQLExceptionSorter</exception-sorter-class-name>





<metadata>

<type-mapping>mySQL</type-mapping>
</metadata>
</local-tx-datasource>
</datasources>

The important lines are the bolded ones, one is for the url used for connecting to the mysql server; if you didn't change the port it listens to, leave 3306. 'localhost' is the host where the mysql server is running, if is something other than this, change it to the ip to reflect it corectly. After the slash there's the name of the datatbase the driver would connect to by default (in my case, "OPA").
The <user-name> element is obviously for specifying the user name that should be used when trying to connect to the mysql server, and the <password> element is for its corresponding password. Make sure u've created the user before testing the connection and have assigned that user with the rights for your above mentioned database. (see mysql manual for these operations :) )

3.Modify the file [jboss-location]\server\default\conf\standardjaws.xml
:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE jbosscmp-jdbc PUBLIC
"-//JBoss//DTD JBOSSCMP-JDBC 3.0//EN"
"http://www.jboss.org/j2ee/dtd/jbosscmp-jdbc_3_0.dtd">










<jaws>
<datasource>java:/MySqlDS</datasource>
<type-mapping>mySQL</type-mapping>

<debug>false</debug>

<default-entity>
......{this part is unchanged}

4.Modify the file
[jboss-location]\server\default\conf\standardjbosscmp-jdbc.xml :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE jbosscmp-jdbc PUBLIC
"-//JBoss//DTD JBOSSCMP-JDBC 4.0//EN"
"http://www.jboss.org/j2ee/dtd/jbosscmp-jdbc_4_0.dtd">









<jbosscmp-jdbc>

<defaults>
<datasource>java:/MySqlDS</datasource>


<create-table>true</create-table>
<remove-table>false</remove-table>
........
Leave the long rest of this file unchanged. The <remove-table> is set to false so i would keep my application tables after a redeployment.
You don't have to change it from the default value of 'true' if you don't want this behaviour.

5.Add a <application-policy> element - inside the main <policy> one,
but not intercalated with other <application-policy> tags - in the
[jboss-location]\server\default\conf\login-config.xml file :

<policy>
.....
<application-policy name = "MySqlDbRealm">
<authentication>
<login-module code =
"org.jboss.resource.security.ConfiguredIdentityLoginModule"
flag = "required">
<module-option name =
"principal">the_mysql_username</module-option>
<module-option name =
"userName">the_mysql_username</module-option>

<module-option name
="password">the_mysql_pass</module-option>
<module-option name =
"managedConnectionFactoryName">jboss.jca:service=LocalTxCM,name=MySqlDS</module-option>
</login-module>
</authentication>
</application-policy>

....
</policy>

6.1. I don' really know if one could leave the jms need for a persistence environment to the old data source, HypersonicDS, and as I havent' used jms yet I can't be sure if I did the switching correctly (but by the lack of errors I'd say I did). But i proceeded to this step just to be sure:
Replace file [jboss-location]/server/default/deploy/jms/hsql-jdbc2-service.xml by
file [jboss-location]/docs/examples/jms/mysql-jdbc2-service.xml.

6.2.Rename hsqldb-jdbc-state-service.xml to mysql-jdbc-state-service.xml and change the line where the DeafultDS is mentioned:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>



<server>








<mbean code="org.jboss.mq.sm.jdbc.JDBCStateManager"
name="jboss.mq:service=StateManager">
<depends
optional-attribute-name="ConnectionManager">jboss.jca:service=DataSourceBinding,name=MySqlDS</depends>

<attribute name="SqlProperties">
...

7. I can't stress out how important this was for me, it was the point missing in all other guides I read (many, so many of them....) :find all files containing a reference to DefaultDS and replace that reference with MySqlDS and do the same in replacing Hypersonic SQL with mySQL.

8. Don't forget to edit the persistence.xml in yout application to reflect the new data source used:

<persistence>
<persistence-unit name="the_name_of_your_persistence_unit">
<jta-data-source>java:/MySqlDS</jta-data-source>
<properties>

<property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto"
value="update"/>
</properties>
</persistence-unit>
</persistence>

I must note that the "update" value in the line <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="update"/> is also a part of the solution
for keeping the data in the tables after a redeploy of the application, instead of losing all the previous populated tables.

problems installing JBoss

I had some problems installing JBoss 4.0.5 with jems, although that's
the way they recommend it on the official site. The problem appeared at
JBoss server startup and was mainly consisting in these errors
appearing in the console:

16:23:42,873 INFO [TomcatDeployer] deploy, ctxPath=/web-console, warUrl=.../deploy/management/conso
le-mgr.sar/web-console.war/
16:23:43,634 INFO [[/web-console]] MonitorsFolder: Failed to init
plugin, null
16:23:43,644 INFO [[/web-console]] UCLs: Failed to init plugin, null
16:23:43,664 INFO [[/web-console]] JMS Message: Failed to init plugin,
null
16:23:43,664 INFO [[/web-console]] JSR77 WebModule: Failed to init
plugin, null
16:23:43,724 INFO [[/web-console]] J2EEFolder: Failed to init plugin,
null
16:23:43,754 INFO [[/web-console]] AOPFolder: Failed to init plugin,
null
16:23:43,754 INFO [[/web-console]] SystemFolder: Failed to init
plugin, null
16:23:43,804 INFO [[/web-console]] MBeans: Failed to init plugin, null
16:23:43,814 INFO [[/web-console]] JSR77 Domains and Servers: Failed
to init plugin, null
16:23:43,814 INFO [[/web-console]] JSR77 EJBModules and EJBs: Failed
to init plugin, null
16:23:43,824 INFO [[/web-console]] JSR77 J2EE Apps: Failed to init
plugin, null
16:23:47,870 INFO [MailService] Mail Service bound to java:/Mail
...

After some digging, I found out that there was a bug in the jems
installer 1.2.0 CR1 that led to a line missing in a config xml file
(\jboss-4.0.5.GA\server\default\deploy\management\console-mgr.sar\web-console.war\WEB-INF\jboss-web.xml).
The obvious solution was, as a JBoss poster stated on the forum, to put
the missing line in place (see this ),
but disappointingly this didn't work for me. I really needed a EJB 3.0
supporting version of JBoss 4.0.5, and after some more hassle with the
jems installer, I finally decided to abandon this path and go directly
to the source code. I unpacked it and built it with ant (the build.xml
is provided) - for some odd meaningless reason the build.sh failed to
run - then got my ejb 3.0 enabled server in
jboss-4.0.5.GA-src\build\output\jboss-4.0.5.GA-ejb3 folder. Note that jdk1.5 is required for this,
no earlier version would do for ejb 3.0. That's about it, I hope I
didn't forget impotant details, hopefully this would spare some people the
pain of going through the same countless tries of installing a good
version of JBoss 4.0.5 server.

I had some troubles with migrating from the default JBoss data
source (Hypersonic) to mysql, but I'll write about this later.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

phplinkdirectory errors

Today I got this strange error:

Warning: Smarty error: validate: validator id 'v_user' is not registered. in /home/dir/libs/smarty/Smarty.class.php on line 1088

After some investigations I noticed my server's disk was out of space.
So removing some big logs which were taking most of the space, fixed the problem.