Posts
Bloated Web Pages
#Crapification of Everything#Software#Web
Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. Corollaries to this law apply to most areas of software development. For example, the memory required for a program typically expands to fill the space available. This is especially true in embedded systems where code is placed in ROM. We could probably formulate a newer version of this law for the World Wide Web, relating average internet speeds to web page size.
February 1, 2018
Converting from Mandarin M3 to Koha
I wrote previously about Koha, an open source library system that our little (24,000 book) library in Vermont is now using. Before we switched to Koha, we were using Mandarin M3. This is a proprietary system that is accessed primarily through a Windows application that connects to a database server hosted by Mandarin. The system worked fairly well, but there were a number of problems and annoyances (not to mention pricing) that pushed us to move to Koha. But migrating our catalog, patron list, and checkout information to Koha was a challenge, and we didn’t want to do it manually, which could take months. I ended up writing some Ruby scripts to perform these tasks.
August 9, 2017
Infinite recursion in Rails associations
I’m working on a Rails 5.0 project that is using an existing database. This kind of project is more difficult than creating a database from scratch using Rails migrations. One problem is that the existing database doesn’t use Rails conventions for the names of its columns. That led me to a bone-headed mistake in my model associations that caused Rails to get into an infinite recursion.
June 20, 2017
Unblock sound on resume in Linux Mint
#Linux#Software#Linux Mint#Ubuntu
On the ThinkPad T60p and T61, using Linux Mint 17 and later (and probably Ubuntu 16.04 or later), sound is not properly initialized after a suspend/resume cycle. The symptom is that after a resume, playing a video on YouTube produces no sound. The fix is to play a sound file using the /usr/bin/play utility (part of the sox package), which unblocks or reinitializes the audio device.
May 30, 2017
KVM on Linux Mint 18
#Linux#Software#Linux Mint#Ubuntu#Vmware#Kvm#Koha
I’ve been running Koha on Debian 8 in a VMware Workstation virtual machine, to test it prior to deployment on Linode for a real library. Yesterday I decided to investigate running this VM in KVM, the native Linux virtualization system that is used at Linode. The conversion went well on both Linux Mint 17 and 18. What follows are the steps I used on Mint 18 (Mate edition).
March 18, 2017
Pandoc on Linux Mint 18
#Linux#Software#Linux Mint#Ubuntu
As mentioned earlier, I use Pandoc instead of a word processor to prepare printed documents. Installing it on Linux Mint 18 reminded me that in order to create PDF files, you need to install more than Pandoc itself. Here is what I had to do to install Pandoc and the Latex files it requires:
March 10, 2017
Emacs key bindings in Firefox on Linux Mint Mate or Cinnamon
#Linux#Software#Linux Mint#Ubuntu
Firefox can use Emacs key bindings in editable text fields, but the method for enabling this feature has changed in Mint over the years. In the Mate edition of Linux Mint, this command will do the trick: gsettings set org.mate.interface gtk-key-theme 'Emacs' In the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint, use this: gsettings set org.cinnamon.desktop.interface gtk-key-theme 'Emacs'
March 4, 2017
VMware Workstation 11 on Linux Mint 18
#Linux#Software#Linux Mint#Ubuntu#Vmware
VMware Workstation 11 was released before Linux Mint 18 (and its parent, Ubuntu 16.04). Because the Linux kernel has changed, the Workstation installer fails to compile the vmmon and vmnet modules. Fixing this requires some minor patches. Once this is done, Workstation itself won’t start; fixing this requires a minor patch to a couple of shell scripts.
March 1, 2017
Bill and Me
I once spent a weekend with Bill Gates and some of his cronies, including Paul Allen, before either of them became rich and famous. It was just a matter of chance, and it didn’t seem all that big of a deal at the time.
January 22, 2017
Koha on Linode
#Linux#Software#Debian#Koha#Apache
Koha is an open source library system that is used widely throughout the world, and especially in Vermont. For various reasons (including financial) our library was not able to join either of the two consortia of Koha users in Vermont. So I installed Koha on Linode for the exclusive use of our library. Linode is a hosting service that provides low-cost Linux virtual servers, called “Linodes”. Installing Koha in a Linode is a straightforward process, but it does require that you to be somewhat comfortable with typing commands at a command prompt.
January 18, 2017