Archive for January, 2010

Eclipse issues in Linux Mint

I’ve been wrestling with IDEs and OSs for the past few days, trying to decide which would be best for Javascript and PHP development. I had been using Netbeans. I absolutely love Netbeans, but I found that editing Javascript in it was somewhat lacking. I was having trouble keeping up with my nested anonymous functions and thought it’d be a good time to try out other alternatives.

I bounced around between Linux Mint, Mac OS X, and Windows 7. I find that I would really like to program on my Macbook Pro, but it just doesn’t feel comfortable. There’s something about the keyboard setup or something that just annoys me. It’s more of a problem with my familiarity with the keyboard, I think. At any rate, after messing with Eclipse, Netbeans, and Textmate on my Mac, I decided it was going to be a no-go.

Windows 7 presented a problem in the fact that XAMPP seems to have issues with sessions. They work but almost at random, creating a new session will lock up the entire web server. When you are developing a website which uses Sessions for user logins, that creates a problem. So, I decided it would be in my best interest to use Linux, which seems to be made for programmers, because most programming related things work great in it and the fact that you almost have to be a programmer to get some things to work correctly in it. Though, that is an outdated misconception, but everyone still seems to believe it.

I had been using Linux for most of the development of my new project anyway. So, there was no transition there. I’m using SVN on a server machine so it really didn’t matter which OS or IDE I decided upon for that. They are all pretty universal in their ability to handle SVN. The major exception was Mac OS X which didn’t include the ssh-askpass command needed to tunnel SVN through ssh correctly. I was able to find a shell script that handled the ssh-askpass function, however. Textmate didn’t really work well, either, because it didn’t really have robust SVN integration. It was pretty much just like manual SVN. I also needed separate programs for Diff and Merge. That was lacking and clunky. I was spoiled by Netbeans’ built-in Merge, Diff, SVN, and so forth.

I thought I’d give Aptana a try. It is a PHP developer plugin for Eclipse. It is also available in a standalone package. I had various problems with the standalone version of Aptana so I decided to install Eclipse from the LinuxMint/Ubuntu repositories. Eclipse worked great, and Aptana installed perfectly. However, I needed the SVN tools that are Aptana add-ons. They wouldn’t install. There was a version conflict with the version of Eclipse in the LinuxMint/Ubuntu repositories.

So I decided to install the latest version of Eclipse. I downloaded and ran the latest version and found that there were UI issues. This brings me to the subject of this post. The UI issues were a major roadblock, so I searched for a solution. The problem, I believe, stems from compositing inside Gnome. Unlike Ubuntu, I couldn’t find an easy way to turn off compositing inside LinuxMint. OH, I’m sure I could disable the compositing extension inside the xorg.conf file, but I really wanted a light switch option. The normal way I would handle this is the Fusion Icon. It didn’t seem to work. I also tried disabling effects from the Gnome Appearances menu option. Compositing just wouldn’t turn off that easily.

So here is the solution for Eclipse and Aptana inside Linux Mint.

GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true /opt/eclipse/eclipse

That will work if eclipse is installed in /opt/eclipse, but I just had mine downloaded to my home folder. It doesn’t really matter. You would just change the /opt/eclipse/eclipse to your actual executable path. The key here is to add the GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true before the eclipse command.

I’m about to create a shortcut to do this for me. Now all my buttons will work when I click on them. That’s convenient huh.

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Resetting WordPress Passwords Manually

I’ve had to do this for my wife and her mom both, so I thought I would share this with anyone who needs to reset a WordPress password. I personally love WordPress. You can build any type of site with it, not just a blog. If you have created a WordPress site but haven’t visited the admin dashboard in a while, you may have forgotten your password. I thought that WordPress would email you a lost password, but maybe they didn’t put in their correct email address. It could have also been the installation script they used through cPanel. Whichever the case, they couldn’t get into their dashboard and they needed their passwords sent to them.

There’s a very easy way to reset that password through SQL. Whether you are using phpmyadmin or some other SQL client to access your databases, you’ll want to use the following SQL statement to reset your password:

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UPDATE `wp_users` SET `user_pass`=md5('password1') WHERE `ID`=1;

You can change password1 to whatever you want. I’m amazed that WordPress passwords aren’t stored with more encryption than a simple MD5 hash. It’s secure enough, don’t get me wrong. I’m just surprised that the WordPress developers didn’t opt for more.

Oh well, I hope that helps someone in a pinch.

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Weight Loss Time

About four years ago, I gave up drinking as a hobby. I was drinking around a 12-pack per day. I had been doing that for about three years is my best guess. I didn’t give up drinking altogether. I just stop drinking daily. I actually haven’t had a drink in a few months, and before then it was months since I’d had one. So, all-in-all I’m completely broken from that habit.

That was my first goal. Once I was able to go months without drinking, I decided it would be a good time to stop smoking. That was my primary goal. I knew that, as long as I was still drinking, I would never be able to stop smoking. So, I went to my company’s nurse practitioner and she set me up with a prescription to Chantix.

Now, I don’t have an affiliation with Chantix. I make nothing from saying this. That medicine was awesome. I went into the whole thing thinking I’d like to quit smoking. I wasn’t very determined. I just thought it would be a good idea to try. Maybe I really had more determination than I thought. Who knows? At any rate, I started taking the Chantix and set my quit date for a week into the treatment. This is how I was instructed to do it. Within three days of taking the Chantix, I stopped smoking. I didn’t even finish the whole week. Smoking started to make me nauseous. I continued to take the Chantix for about three weeks. The instructions I received were to keep taking it for at least two months. I couldn’t handle the sick feelings I got from it, and I was certain I had quit smoking for good.

That was September 13, 2008. I have smoked half a cigarette since then. I hated it. Now I’m smoke-free but I have a new problem.

At the time I quit smoking, I was working in an office position. I was already gaining weight from that. I’m about 5’9″ and when I quit smoking I was up to 220 lbs. Within four months of quitting, I was up to 240 lbs. My weight equalised at that point. That is much heavier than I’ve ever been. Just 6 years ago, I was around 180 lbs. Three years before that, I was around 150 lbs. So, less than a decade ago, I was around 90 lbs lighter than I am today.

I know it’s corny, but my new years resolution is to loss weight. I’m cutting my calorie intake down to less than 1200 per day, and I’m jumping on the treadmill twice a day for no less than 100 calories burned each time. Also, my calorie intake has to be limited to mostly snacks of 100 calories or less spaced out at least one hour apart. There will be exceptions to this and I’m not going to kill myself trying to stick to these rules but those are my general rules for the weight loss program. I’ll probably be eating lots of tuna straight. Hopefully I can stick to this. It’s about the only thing left for me to fix about myself.

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