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Archive for June, 2009

I am not too smart, and so are the Ubuntu people

25 Jun

I was trying to upgrate Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 (I know, it’s 9.06 now). No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the Update Manager to run. It always sat there keeping quiet. I check the System Monitor and it told me “inet_wait_for_connect”. Good, so I worked on my proxy and all the network setting stuff (not too many, actually, told you I am not smart). At the end, I was smart enough to try the download server in the US of A and it worked. …geez, why did I not know to use the main server instead of the domestic server? I think I need to get smarter to use Ubuntu on my 4 computers (now all running Ubuntu). Or, the Ubuntu people need to get smarter, so I don’t have to.

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So I got the Update Manager to work for me. Now it came to run for like 5-10 minutes giving me those step by step pleasure. ( I have to admit it: I am addicted to those virtual sense of achievement. It makes me feel like I am handling something…) Anyway, after the suspending excitement the Update Manager to me I need some hundreds more MB’s. …can’t you tell me at the beginning?

Now I am going to take VirtualBox away…it’s a nice work by the nice people in Sun Microsystems…wait, the Oracle people soon-to-be or already. The Disk Usage Analyzer says VirtualBox is usring 4.5 GB but I take a look and it should be using only 2…where are the other 2.5?

Sigh…there are so many things I don’t understand about computers…

 
2 Comments

Posted in Ubuntu

 

Adobe people are not the smartest in the world when it comes to Chinese font pack

16 Jun

After fruitless efforts trying so hard to find a fontpack (acroasianfontpack, to be specific) for viewing stupid Chinese PDF documents on Ubuntu+FireFox, I found a language pack.

You know what? the acroasianfontpack is specifically in the warning message. But if you go to the website designated, you won’t find the fontpack you need. If you download the 8. something version, the installation will haunt you.

Now, the grand people in Adobe have created this webpage: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=10&platform=unix. (Doesn’t make sense, I know. They could have named it Linux/Unix…or something easier) On the page you can scroll down to Add-Ons and you will see a font pack for Adobe Reader 9.1, which is the Adobe Reader version from Synaptic Package Manager (was on Add/Move Applications and that makes more sense).

Anyway, who would be so conscious to hide their own products, right? The font packs are so secure that you can’t find them through my friend Google.

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I tried the 9.1 font pack and, surprise, doesn’t work. I know somewhere some guys have 100 pages of how-tos on how to make it work. But hey, I don’t have more hours on this. So I turned to Adobe Reader 8.15 Transitional Chinese version. The PDF files got downloaded but would not open in FireFox. :-(

Thank you, Ubuntu, for freeing me up from Windows. I know now how it is like to be out of the Matrix.

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Update on July 10, 2009. Still no dice. For some documents Adobe just doesn’t like them.

 
1 Comment

Posted in IT, Ubuntu

 

“Zotero user data DB version is newer than SQL file”

16 Jun

Suddenly I got this error message “Zotero user data DB version is newer than SQL file” when clicking on the little yellow triangle sign on the cute little zotero icon in the corner of FireFox. …What? Zotero only works with FireFox but not IE? What a great revenger! Seriously, I love it. It’s about time for those guys who design the webpages that won’t show properly without IE to bow to us and use FireFox for a change…well, they probably don’t read as much because they have to be ignorant enough to do those IE-only pages. And, you know what? This actually revealed a problem of the legitimate illiteracy rate in Taiwan. I think most web designers in Taiwan are either illiterate or blind (sorry to the blind people).

Oh, you want to know about the error message? I got that couple of weeks ago and it won’t go away. I looked up in a forum at Zotero official site and their solution didn’t work for me. I am using Zotero 2.0 Beta 5 of Zotero and FireFox 3. I tried reinstalling new OpenOffice plugin and it didn’t work. I tried to reinstall 2.0 Beta 5 but the download stopped at 612 KB of 1.9 MB repeatedly (quite strange, eh?). So I ended up with this:
1. From Firefox Add-Ons, instead of directly download from Zotero site, install Zotero 1.
2. After that, go to Zotero home page and click on the 2 Beta icon to upgrade to Zotero 2.

Why don’t I just post to the Zotero forum? I would, normally. Just don’t feel like join their conversation there.

 
1 Comment

Posted in Zotero

 

Replacing Original DropBox Emblems in Ubuntu

09 Jun

I am on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty and using DropBox for synchronizing my files across computers. One thing bothers me a lot is the HUMONGOUS size of the green uptodate (synchronized) emblems created by DropBox. I won’t stop complaining just because I like DropBox and I don’t know who came up with such an idea but it was supposed to be a good one. It’s just wrong. It’s a huge green round with a white check sign on it.  The emblem pretty much covers all of the file icons when I use list view.

I googled and found some guy says that you only have to replace the emblem in that folder so I did. I created a smaller green circle and dropped it into the folder. Nothing happened. Just when I almost forgot about it, it worked. I don’t know why but my little green emblem is satisfying now. I like it! I feel like I should receive a Nobel prize for it.

Why didn’t it work and why does it work now? I don’t know. I guess that’s why we need to either create a “god of comptuers” or simply worship a existing one. I don’t mind to be worshiped.

I went to the folder with my modified (smaller) emblem file with the same name and copy it to replace the current emblem file. The command I used:

*****desktop:~$ sudo cp emblem-dropbox-uptodate.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/64×64/emblems/

The graphic below is the before:

Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in DropBox, Ubuntu

 

Zotero, where were you before?

09 Jun

Hey finally someone is doing something for us academians. Zotero amazed me with the easiness of use and richness of features.

I have used Refworks and couldn’t figure out how that thing would come into the list of site liscence of the university library. …Oh, the university library — that explains it all. Don’t get me wrong. I think there are good people doing good work in the library, but some of them libarians have very different view of what a university library should be like. Anyway, I am going to promote Zotero from now on (to my students at least) using my time freed by Zotero from the university library. Oh, if you are interested, I couldn’t figure out how to ride Refworks…what a beast.

Zotero works with OpenOffice, which is what I am using now. This is a huge relief since this time freeware does not free me from getting my job done.

The synch database function is cool, too. I save a copy in my DropBox and synchronize my database, which is really cool. I have one notebook computer at home, another NB at school, one desktop PC in my research office and another in my administration office. So now I realize why my research has been drowning: I didn’t have Zotero. But now, I can work anytime, anywhere (without taking breaks).

Zotero’s got a group feature which I have not used yet. I am building my library and will give it a shot later. I think it may be very interesting if the group project thingy actually works.

As for the ISI Web of Knowledge (Thompson Reuters), I think they have caused enough trouble for this world. In Taiwan, we have this SCI phenomenon (aka, Stupid Chinese Idea) that the performance of your job as a college teacher is to be measured mainly (if not solely) by how many articles you put into SCI and SSCI journal databases. If you don’t know yet, Thompson Teuters is suing George Mason U. for doing such an excellent job releasing Zotero to beat EndNote. If I am too rich, of coures, I would definitely support EndNote. I believe it to be a great software and the best and all…Zotero rocks!! Let’s say, the day ISI opens to Zotero, I’ll get my department to buy some copies of EndNote. Please phone me when the day comes.

Those guys in George Mason U., where have you been hiding? (I mean, thank you!!)

 
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Posted in Zotero

 

StatPress, unique visitors to this site

08 Jun

I use StatPress for get my WordPress blog stat analysis. I thought I would get popular start writing a blog…turned out that everybody’s got 3~5 blogs. Well, I got more than that. I used blogspot before they were acquired by Google.

StatPress is nice and easy to use (unlike Google Analytics. Highly recommended.

Anyway, two things about StatPress Reloaded that are totally intolerable:

1. Why does it only show a handful of visitors? I should have more…

2. On June 6 and 7 I don’t have any unique visitors? How does this work? No unique visitors? But I was receiving traffic…strange. I don’t think I have loyal visitors already. Too early for that, you know. BTW, if there’s something wrong about this, it’s StatPress Reloaded, not mine.

unique-viewer

 
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Posted in IT

 

CSS, new website, and bluehost…

08 Jun

I know i am not supposed to spend my time on this, but building a new website is so tempting and I would like to practice CSS a little bit. So, I started today and built http://www.polochen.com. It’s a cool website and I am going to add a lot more content to make it a great website as my web presence. WordPress is good and all, but I feel like I need to be more in control with my website. With this hand-code thing I can tweak all I want to and the limit is my technical skills and my imagination.

(A great resource for learning CSS is W3Schools. Very useful materials there. The tutorials make sense. Even I can follow, most of the time.)

I use bluehost.com, which is a cheap and lousy web hosting service provider. They provide close-to-none service but are very good at marketing I guess. Anyway sometimes I can find trouble-shooting tips from googling around. I guess that’s because their forum and support sections are really not functioning. Today I had problems showing images and the error message is 403 permission denied. I can fix the permissions but it still wouldn’t work for me. So I googled and turned to the hot-link feature. Bluehost’s hot-link feature has some problems: You really need to double-check to make sure you have enabled or unenabled it since that button play with you there. The list of the files to be protected then repeat itself in the blank so you get double or triple entries of everything…without doing anything. So at the end I gave up and disabled hot-link protection. Now everybody can link to my /images/Hot-Super-Model/ folder and steal my nude collections. (No, I don’t have one…but I did.)

Anyway, good job well done, man!

 
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Posted in Uncategorized

 

Gmail needs a message viewing pane

06 Jun

I guess no one except those geniuses in Google knows why Gmail does not have viewing pane. If I could, I would as them: what’s wrong with a viewing pane? Seriously, Gmail needs a huge massage on it’s face.

 
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Posted in Google Watch

 

How to uninstall “Chrome for Linux” in Unbuntu Jaunty?

06 Jun

I was doing my usual news reading (the ever boring and couldn’t-top biased Unted News www.udn.com which I read daily because other press have worse writing). A title caught me saying that Google has a unstable test version of Chrome for Linux released. Well, I thought it’s about the time. Since I got nothing better to do, why don’t I get a Chrome for Linux. It seems though I was not able to find it and finally I ended up with Chromium. No thanks to the no-brain news reporters in Taiwan.

So I downloaded the newest version of Chromium and it is, as expected, quite crapy. The display of webpages is a mess so I can’t wait to uninstall it…but how? After some searches I came to Synaptic Package Manager and there’s a nice little green box there for me to click on to uninstall. Nice and easy. Chiao, “Chrome for Linux”! Thank you for being smart enough to register in Synaptic Package Manager.

 
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Posted in Google Watch, Ubuntu

 

I gave up on the Arras Theme for now

04 Jun

After couple of hours of searching, I had to give up Arras theme for now because I couldn’t figure out where to put the pictures with each post. It would be nice to be able to do so easily, right?

I know it’s either my stupidity or someone else’s, but this should be a lot easier. If I can do it, then Johnny can. If even me as a computer guy can not do it, what a shame!! (I’ll drink less local beer but for aging, I can’t do a thing.)

 
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Posted in WordPress

 
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