Installing ies4linux on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala by just running “./ies4linux” might show some warnings such as:

IEs4Linux 2 is developed to be used with recent Wine versions (0.9.x). It seems that you are using an old version. It’s recommended that you update your wine to the latest version (Go to: winehq.com).

In my case it showed the above text, which seems to be a warning, and run the UI but then got stuck and didn’t complete anything.

To overcome this issue simply run the installation without the GTK based UI in a terminal window:

./ies4linux –no-gui

That’s it. Works like a charm.

Launching a startup is like sending a message in a bottle. If the message is not clear, no one will come to visit your lonely island or send you a postcard back.

When you launch your startup, your online presence (i.e. website, twitter account, facebook page, etc) and the buzz you manage to create online via the online official and unofficial press are the message you are passing to your users. If the message is not clear you can lose a lot of attention.

Before launching your startup you might want to test your messaging. I propose two very simple tests that can serve as rather good markers to determine if your message is clear.

Tests Rules:

• Each of the tests should be given to 2 different people
• These people should have no prior knowledge of your startup and what it does
• One person should be a Non-Techie – someone not from the tech industry who is known to have little to no technical background. The other should be a Techie – someone from the tech industry that can eventually ask a question along the lines of “How are you going to implement this?” and understand the answer.
• Each test should have a different set of people, you cannot reuse people from one test in the other test.

Test #1 – One sentence or less (or the 140 character pitch)

Tell each of the 2 people in one sentence or less what your startup does. If they don’t ask for additional clarification then you can consider that your message is rather clear. If they don’t ask for additional clarification, but are rather intrigued by your startup and message you can safely assume your message is clear enough and your startup does interest them.

Test #2 – The blind website test

Show your website to the 2 people without saying a word. Ask them to read what is written and explain to you what they think your startup is about. If they can explain it and understand completely what you are doing you can be certain enough that your web site message is clear even to new users who has no prior knowledge of what your startup does.

If you did not pass one of the test, try it again on a different set of people (just to make sure these 4 are not a statistical anomaly). If the result is still the same try to revise your messaging and, as always, remember to rinse and repeat.

I was just reading over at TechCrunch about Google quickly hiring Don Dodge after he was let go from Microsoft. It seems Don will be doing what he used to do at Microsoft – Developer Evangelism (good for him, and Google!).

I’m very happy to see that Google is putting their stock options and cash where their mouth is to evangelize their APIs, platforms (Android, AppEngine) and tools to developers.

A while back I wrote about the lack of Google’s outreach in the Israeli developers community, and it is still very visible in Israel by the jobs listings as well as various events and conventions that Microsoft Technology still dominates the Israeli high-tech software scene.

I do hope that hiring Don Dodge and keep on releasing tools, SDKs, Platforms and even languages such as the new Go programming language, to create the necessary diversification that every monopolized field needs.

I just hope that Google will start to do more than just very simple and shallow Dev Days in Israel and will start reaching out the community, specifically in Israel. I would like to see a Google I/O event in Israel and may be a couple of smaller events that dig down into code and details in a more intimate scenario with less people.

In general I would expect Google to start evangelizing in other countries and start having evangelists in every country they have an office. I would suggest Google to learn a bit from MSDN as well as the Microsoft Valued Professional (MVP) program – these tools are one of the best examples of creating a community based on core leaders that can drive the community as well as Google straight up.

Google is still light years from reaching the well oiled, well organized Microsoft evangelism machine and I hope Don and other will be able to make big leaps to close that gap.

Whenever a new programming language appears some claim its the best thing since sliced bread (tm – not mine ), other claim its the worst thing that can happen and you can implement everything that the language provides in programming language X (assign X to your favorite low level programming language and append a suitable library).

After seeing Google’s new Go programming language I must say I’m excited. Not because its from Google and it got a huge buzz around the net. I am excited about the fact that people decided to think differently before they went on and created Go.

I’m reading Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages (a good read for any programming language fanaticos) which is a set of interviews with various programming languages creators and its very interesting to see the thoughts and processes behind a couple of the most widely used programming languages (and even some non-so-widely-used programming languages).

In a recent interview Brad Fitzpatrick (of LiveJournal fame and now a Google employee) was asked:

You’ve done a lot of work in Perl, which is a pretty high-level language. How low do you think programmers need to go – do programmers still need to know assembly and how chips work?

To which he replied:

… I see people that are really smart – I would say they’re good programmers – but say they only know Java. The way they think about solving things is always within the space they know. They don’t think ends-to-ends as much. I think it’s really important to know the whole stack even if you don’t operate within the whole stack.

I subscribe to Brad’s point of view because   a) you need to know your stack from end to end – from the metals in your servers (i.e. server configuration), the operating system internals to the data structures used in your code and   b) you need to know more than one programming language to open up your mind to different ways of implementing a solution to a problem.

Perl has regular expressions baked into the language making every Perl developer to think in pattern matching when performing string operations instead of writing tedious code of finding and replacing strings. Of course you can always use various find and replace methods, but the power and way of thinking of compiled pattern matching makes it much more accessible, powerful and useful.

Python has lists and dictionaries (using a VERY efficient hashtable implementation, at least in CPython) backed into the language because lists and dictionaries are very powerful data structures that can be used in a lot solutions to problems.

One of Go’s baked in features is concurrency support in the form of goroutines. Goroutines makes the use of multi-core systems very easy without the complexities that exists in multi-processing or multi-threading programming such as synchronization. This feature actually shares some ancestry with Erlang (which by itself has a very unique syntax and vocabulary for scalable functional programming).

Every programming language brings something new to the table and a new way of looking at things and solving problems. That’s why its so special

If you are getting the error “”issubclass() arg 1 must be a class”" with Google App Engine SDK for Python on Linux its probably because you are running Python 2.6 (and will probably happen to you when you run Ubuntu 9.04 – 2.6 is the default there).

Just run the dev server under python 2.5 (i.e. python2.5 dev_appserver.py)

If you are getting the following error while adding a Samba based network printer to Vista:

Windows cannot connect to the printer. Operation could not be completed (error 0×000006d1).

And you have a Samba server (version 3.0 and above) consider using the following technique to add the printer:

• Add a local printer (not a network one!)
• Select “create a new port”
• Select “Local port” as type of port
• In the port name enter the printer’s SMB path, i.e. \\sambaserver\printer_name
• Select the right driver

That’s all. Works like a charm!

If you have an older version of Samba (< 3.0) know that Vista uses NTLMv2 by default. Follow these instructions to revert back to NTLMv1 by default (also true for regular shares).

Also note that since this is a local printer that prints to a print queue on the Samba server, you might not be able to delete print jobs that were completely sent to the Samba server print queue, since we essentially created a local queue.

Today I got the following error on Pidgin (I’m running version 2.5.2 on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex) while it tried to connect to MSN:

“Unable to retrieve MSN Address Book”

After searching a bit I found this post by Gijs Nelissen which said to use a different MSN plugin for Pidgin called msn-pecan.

I’ll reiterate the instructions for those with Ubuntu / Debian:

1. Close Pidgin (make sure the process is really down)
2. Run “apt-get install msn-pecan”
3. Start pidgin
4. Change your MSN account type from MSN to WLM
5. Reconnect

I don’t know if this error affects other libpurple based multi-headed IMs (such as Adium) (UPDATE: It appears this IS a libpurple issue – so Adium IS affected), however, the msn-pecan project has a Windows binary release as well as source release (if you care/need/want to compile it for Mac OS X or other Linux distributions).

On the day of Ubunut 8.10 I’ve upgraded my work laptop (Dell D630) to Ubuntu 8.10. I’ve previously ran my home desktop on the release candidates and saw that all is well so I didn’t expect any specific issues with the upgrade.

After finishing the upgrade successfully I’ve encountered 2 problems.

The first was with the computer fan. It was workin on and off in full steam in 4 seconds cycles. Really annoying. A quick search in the Ubuntu forums led to this post saying I should upgrade to the latest BIOS version (A13 – at least at the time of writing this post).

Upgrading to the latest BIOS stopped the fan from cycling to full speed and full stop but it was still running a bit too much even when the computer was rather idle.

There was another post in the forums that suggested to go back to the older Nvidia drivers (version 173) instead of using the version which ships with Ubuntu 8.10 (177).

That managed to solve the fan issues for now as well as fix some strange repaint problems I was seeing when working with TwinView and extending my screen to another external monitor.

Thought it might help others who face these problems.

As I’ve previously mentioned, tomorrow I’ll be at the Google Developer Day taking place at Avenue Center near TLV airport.

If you want to me and talk or just say hi ping me.

About a year and a half ago I’ve written about Google Israel’s position in the Israeli development community (actually, there lack of) and that a company like Google should be more involved.

This was written around the time the 2007 Google Developer Day happened in more than 10 places around the world but not in Israel.

I opened my Email this morning and to my surprise I found an invitation to the Google Developer Day 2008 in Israel.

It seems there is a good schedule and a very interesting cast of lecturers. Some of the lecturers are Israeli Googlers while others are Googlers from Europe and the USA.

While most of it revolves around Google technologies (GData and the APIs, AppEngine, V8 JavaScript engine) or Google sponsored initiatives (OpenSocial) it’s a good start for a conversation between the Israeli development community and Google Israel (or Google in general for that matter).

I hope this is a first step in Google’s involvment in the Israeli development community, one that will lead to a more diverse and engaged community.

The event will take place on November 2nd at the Avenue convention center (near Airprot city). Currently registration requires an invitation.

I’ve already registered and if nothing else will change my schedule I will be there. If you also registered and know me (or don’t know me yet) feel free to drop by and say hi.