Anyone who uses GNU Screen frequently will one day press Ctl-A s (lower-case s) whether purposefully or accidentally. It would seem that there is no way to unlock the screen. Actually, the solution is to press Ctl-A q (lower-case q). You will then be prompted to enter the user’s password to resume using Screen.

Reading this post confirms my decision not to join Facebook a correct one. Hell, if some corporate entity knows about your daughter-in-law, you should be scared!

Another aspect of the Google Apps Provisioning API that I’ve discovered has to do with adding an owner to a group.

Google Apps Provisioning API is a set of API that allows other programs to access stored on Google’s servers. This is done via the Atom Publishing Protocol and HTTP requests (what the industry terms general as a RESTful interface).

The set of data that Google exposes via the Provisioning API include the user accounts and groups and other related data.

Google has improved its groups mechanism not too long ago. With this came improvements to other Google properties such as Google Docs where sharing documents with groups is possible. Previously, this was not available because the original concept of a group in Google Apps is nothing more than an email list where emailing to the “group” allowed users in the “group” to receive the email as well. But this was all that version 1 of “groups” (technically known as an email list) could do.

It was supposed to be a headline-worthy cooperation between the world’s arguably most popular tech blog and a Singapore startup. Now it’s all going downhill. Why and how it came to this stage nobody will know for sure, as Arrington puts it, “Ultimately there are two sides to every story…”

But, if it were the case as Arrington described, the “shareholders” deserve this ending. Why squander away a chance to launch a product in a larger market by leveraging on a famed tech blog’s name and instead choose to have the whole of a much smaller pie? If greed was really the cause, I hope Arrington wins the suits against Fusion Garage.

But Fusion Garage deserves a chance to voice their side of the story. Maybe we’ll get to see something on Straits Times to hear from them what exactly transpired. I hope it’s not because they are unable to produce the software – I really look forward to a successful Singapore tech startup make good internationally.

The Facebook game Animal Swapping has caused me much anguish in my bid to best everyone. Now, I’m only third place. It took me a long time to get there and recently I’m reminded why I don’t want to play it anymore.

Some time into the game, I always encounter this error where two animals will overlap and that makes it difficult to solve the puzzle. I don’t know if it’s due to me using Linux, but it’s a good excuse to say why I can’t be first =P

During the lifetime of using the computer, I believe everyone will inevitably face the scenario where you will want resize multiple images to a certain size.

In Linux, you can do it will such ease that makes you wonder what you use Windows for.

This effect can be easily done using the command line. Naysayers will probably disclaim the effectiveness of this tip but it really is easy for those who know Linux. All you have to do is to go into the directory where the images are stored and run the following command:

for k in $(ls *.jpg); do convert $k -resize 1024x768 -quality 100 re_$k; done

When I was writing my post “Setting a Static IP Address in Ubuntu“, I encountered a strange problem.

In the post I was describing the location of of a directory and it contained the following:

/ etc/network

Notice that there is a space between the word “etc” and the preceding forward slash? If I were remove the space between these two characters, I will get the following error message when I preview or publish the post:

Method Not Implemented

POST to /wordpress/wp-admin/post.php not supported.

I don’t know if this is an isolated incident or a WordPress vulnerability. I wonder if anyone else has encountered this problem.

Just recently I had to set up a few workstations for developer work. I installed them with Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). I had originally installed them with 9.10 (Karmic Koala) but for some bloody reason, Eclipse, both Ganymede and Gallileo, don’t work on Koala. Anyway, that’s another story for another time.

So the workstations are used for Web development, each has to have a static IP address. Being a small outfit, we don’t have a DNS server. Therefore we need to set each machine’s IP address as static. I thought that it could easily be done with the Network Manager tool in the menu bar, but I was wrong.

The server holding the project files for the e-learning application that I’m developing just died on me today. The cause of the server dying is the insertion of a faulty RAM chip. What flabbergasted me was that the chip was idenfitied as faulty before. Why my colleague knowingly placed the RAM into the server I don’t know. I haven’t gotten a chance to ask.

The result of that action was that the server could not boot up. In fact, the problem was so different from what I’ve encountered before that it didn’t even occur to me that RAM could be the problem. The CPU was supposed to be a headless node that our developers access over the network to the repository and the wiki. What tipped me off was that the CPU was not reachable even after turning on. Network cable seems fine, and are connected at both ends properly. The system was working fine the Friday last week. Then I connected a monitor to the server to try to resolve the issue. Strangely, what came up on the monitor is an image that is akin to static noise you see on TV (during the analog days).