Firefox crashed with Didn't find JVM under /opt/firefox/plugins

Try the following (with your paths)
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin

Ubuntu 11.04 - Network Manager not Active

If you make changes via Network Manager that are not doing anything, try the following:

sudo vi /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

Change
managed=false

to
managed=true

Then
sudo /etc/init.d/network-manager restart

Pinata does not break...

Two years in a row, we have had the brilliant idea of having a pinata at our daughter's birthday party. Living in Germany, we thought it would be a treat for the kids to have such an experience (though neither I nor my wife is Mexican or Latin American or likes Tequila)

Last year, for our daughter's fifth birthday, my wife schlepped a pinata across the Atlantic from Texas. Needless to say, it did not break.

This year, we ordered one online (who knew one could order a pinata online in Germany) and again, the kids whacked at it for a good 30 minutes without it even showing a hit of a crack..



I hope the german kids aren't getting the wrong idea about a pinata, that it is something to hit and hit till nothing happens and an adult hs to pry it open to let the candy out.

Selenium clicking links from Safari/Opera not working

There have been lots and lots of solutions proposed for this problem. Let me add mine to the list.

Here is what I was facing: the following (very simple) link click
$link->selenium->click("//td[5]/a/img");

works perfectly in Firefox, IE and Google Chrome but results in no action in Safari or Opera. No error is generated but no change to the website occurs.

After pulling my hair out for two days, I noticed that at the bottom of the Firefox window, the link that results was displayed.


So I changed the command to
$link->selenium->open("main.php?action=adm_overview&lang=de");

And voila!...it was exactly the same as clicking on the link.

If Firefox dos not display the link (for instance, if it displays the Javascript that will be called), then try to use a tool like Webscarb to intercept the outgoing message.

Bromine error - Could not get handle to remote scheduler: Connection refused to host: 127.0.0.1

I pulled my hair out for a day trying to get this solved.

But first, a bit of zen: When I am stuck on a problem that seems intractable, I find it good to walk away from it, sleep on it, and then the next day, debug it some more and read the solutions I've already gone through but did not get me to the solution previously.

The error I kept getting was the following: Scheduler would not start with the error in the title of this blog. I tried running start.sh to check what the error was and that worked fine. WTF!!

The solution was something stupid that I had done.

I needed to enter a static IP address and first used network manager to try to do it which did not work. I ended up just editing the interfaces file to get the static IP address configured.

However, during the time I was messing around with network manager, my /etc/hosts file was written to with an IP address

The following line was added to the /etc/hosts file:

10.41.16.38 test-P5Q-VM #Added by NetworkManager

I just had to delete the line from /etc/hosts and then the scheduler started working.

Zen works. I say this not as a devotee as I am not one. I would like to be but I am not even close. My mind wanders so easily. It takes all my willpower just to get this post finished without moving to something else in between.

Solving SSL error Unable to load config info from /usr/local/ssl/openssl.cnf on Windows

Try the following:

set OPENSSL_CONF=C:/Program Files (x86)/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/conf/openssl.cnf

(or more generally, set it to where openssl.cnf is located)

and now the command which generated the error above should be solved

XPCOM Proxy and getting access to the GUI from non-GUI thread

It was a frustrating week of pulling out hair trying to get this to work.

First, you'll need to get nsIProxyObjectManager which is not part of the Gecko-sdk but the idl file is part of the Firefox source code. So download the Firefox source code for the Firefox version that you're using. If you are using Firefox 2.0, downloading Firefox 3.0 source code and using the idl included there will not suffice. The UID of the IDL in Firefox 3.0 is different from that of Firefox 2.0. It would've saved me half a week of frsutration had I realized this sooner.

I'm sure there are several ways to proceed from here. I found the IDL in the Firefox source, generated a header file out of it using the xpidl command from Gecko-sdk and included that in my project. You'll find that when you try to compile your project with the nsIProxyObejctManager.h inculded, it'll require other header files as well and so you'll have to find and generate header files from a few other IDLs as well. I think in total it comes out to about 10. Not too frustrating a process, but frustrating enough.

Finally, you'll need to access the method you want via the proxy
Declare the proxy object
nsCOMPtr pmgr;
pmgr=do_GetService("@mozilla.org/xpcomproxy;1",&rv);

Now, i'm trying to write to an RDF file via the proxy. So I'll declare an RDF datasource to access via the proxy
nsCOMPtr proxyObject;

And then try to get proxy access to the nsIRDFDataSource
if (pmgr){
rv = pmgr->GetProxyForObject(NS_UI_THREAD_EVENTQ, NS_GET_IID(nsIRDFDataSource), dsource, 1|4, getter_AddRefs(proxyObject));

Now we have a proxy object for calling all functions declared in nsIRDFDataSource. For instance, to call the assert, we would do
proxyObject->Assert(ns_subject, ns_predicate, ns_literal, PR_TRUE);

Its the same for any other XPCOM Interface. You'll need to get access to it via GetProxyForObject and then you can access all functions to it via the proxy as above. Hope this helped.