Another blog bites the dust

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 0x000006d1).

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!

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).

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.