#Tips N' Tricks

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).

If you get the following error while running Synaptic:

**Failed to run /usr/sbin/synaptic

Unable to copy the user’s Xauthorisation file.**

Make sure to that you have enough space in your /tmp directory.

To check if that is indeed the problem run the following command in your terminal:

df -h

This command will show you each mounted volumes you may have including the one mounted to /tmp.

/tmp usually contains temporary data for applications while they run. It sometimes may reach a point where it 100% full (might have happened to me while I upgraded to Hardy Heron 8.04).

2 days after my previous post about installing VmWare Server 1.0.3 from Canonical’s repository, VmWare released version 1.0.4.

I tried using its built-in install script on a vanilla Ubuntu Server 7.04 (a.k.a Feisty Fawn) and it worked flawlessly.

Aside from certain libraries which it needs to compile the vmmon and vmnet kernel modules (the installation script will tell you which ones are missing and you can get them from the repositories using apt-get), you’ll also need to install xinetd.

If you are going to install VmWare server (a great and free server virtualization product from VmWare) on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) and you’ve followed this post showing how to do it using Canonical’s commercial repository, make sure to read this post at the Ubuntu Community Docs.

Basically, if you encounter authentication problems at the Server’s Console after installing the VmWare server and until this bug is fixed, you need to edit /etc/pam.d/vmware-authd to contain:

I own a Nokia E61 phone which I’m very happy with (leave aside the PC Suite backup problem my wife had when she upgraded to an E61 as well).

Even though I’m an Israeli I use its English interface because it’s less buggy and because most of the things I do with the phone (Emails and such) are usually in English, but from time to time I do need the occasional SMS in Hebrew.

I got the following annoying little error after I tried to upgrade to a newer mod_python on my Gentoo Linux box:

�libtool: compile: unable to infer tagged configuration

It seems that the main problem was due to the fact that I’ve switched to GCC 4.1.1 and when compiling mod_python, the compilation uses libtool that is brought and compiled with Apache (located under /usr/share/apr-0/build/) which should have been recompiled after I’ve upgraded to the new GCC (I was too lazy to continue running the “emerge -e system” command so I stopped it after GCC was recompiled).

When I started to think about migrating from Blogger to my own WordPress blog running on my own server I started to look at migration options.

It seems that since I already migrated to the new blogger system (which is out of beta now), the current import options from Blogger available in the latest WordPress installation (2.0.5 when I was installing it ;-) ) didn’t work anymore.

The default blogger import can fail in two points:

I use ZoneAlarm Security Suite on my laptop (yes, it’s running Windows…) since its a cheap and nice complete suite that has a firewall, an anti-virus and anti-spyware software plus a lot of other stuff I rarely use (IM Security and the likes).

I have it for about a year and a couple of months and I saw in the support forums that there is a beta release of version 7.0.

Zoundry released a new version of their Blog Writer product. Some of the more prominent features added (which a lot of users including me asked for) are:

• XHTML Editor – You can now see and edit the generated XHTML
• Spell Checker – No more copying and pasting stuff to another spell checker :-)

Check out the full feature list and download.

I’ve been using Zoundry for the past 6 months as my primary posting tool for this blog as well as my Advanced .NET Debugging blog and it has been really helpful. With the new features now released it is now a kick ass blog writer.

Google Talk stored all of your custom messages that you have entered in a file in your user profile directory.

The file is located at “%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Talk\status”

Inside you will find a file named in the format [userid]-history.txt.

So if your Gmail account is John.Dow@gmail.com the filename will be john.dow_gmail.com-history.txt (besides, there is usually only one file there anyway ;-) ).

The file format is very easy. It start with a first line which has the character “1” in it. I’m not sure what it stands for and what it do but you can disregard it.