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March

Java and Fedora Core 6

Thu 29 Mar 2007
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I hate Java, but I guess that crap got enough attention to plague the computing world just enough so everybody is forced to install it. And don’t give me the crap about “cross-platform compatibility.” Install an JRE not by Sun and running all your JAR files will go haywire. As rudimentary PHP and Perl may seem to be compared to Java, its cross-platform compatibility is way superior than Java and C#.

Fedora Project Wiki: JavaFAQ
Official Fedora page about running Java on Fedora Core 6 and in Web browsers.
JPackage
Yum and APT repositories with free and proprietary Java RPM packages.
ColdFusion MX 7 on Fedora Core 6
I wrote about my adventure of the ColdFusion MX 7 server installation on Fedora Core 6. I have a few pointers about updating the server’s JRE. Useful for updating the time zones!

Le Petit Prince

Tue 27 Mar 2007

In my high school days, it was one of my assignments to read this book. “A sheep in a box? What the hell was that guy on when he wrote this?!” I thought. I knew it was some kind of psycho-babble, but I didn’t want to read that. I lost interest and didn’t read the rest.

However, as the years passed, the more I understood and appreciated the deeper meaning of the few pages I’ve read by Saint-Exupéry. I eventually wanted to read the rest, but never got the time or the will to do so. Rare are the times I’ve read a book.

However, today, my homework is to read “Le Petit Prince”… in Japanese.

(The three books pictured are all part of my Japanese teacher’s collection of various “Petit Prince” editions.)

The Internet is for Porn!

Tue 27 Mar 2007
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Cake, cake, and more cake!

Tue 27 Mar 2007
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CakeBlack teeth with Homo-tasting milkNow, this is something worth to celebrate. During March, all of us at work ate cake once almost every week. The two first cakes were to celebrate two of my colleagues who joined the company a year ago. The third one was to celebrate the company’s eighth year.

Plus, every piece of cake was accompanied by a cup of milk which “Tastes like Homo!” The milk was quite useful at the first cake, which had black icing and made our teeth and lips go black.

I’d show you here my bosses’ faces, but you know, you never know when a client will discover my site and will cut their ties with us because we’re too crazy.

Finally, this is not something about an agent having made the most sales during the past week, or to celebrate a new customer. Fornicate that call centre feces!

Congratulations to my co-workers! Long live the company!

Graffiti

Tue 27 Mar 2007
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I’m always amazed at the amount of writing I see on the bus…

(Cross-posted in the OCTranspo LiveJournal community.)

"This is blue!"

Tue 27 Mar 2007
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I took that picture last week at the OCTranspo MacKenzie King stop and posted the picture just now on the Ottawa LiveJournal community.

If you’re looking for a better picture, here’s Ryoko Hirosue selling a new drink by Coca-Cola in Tokyo. I always liked Ryoko’s work, especially her with Jean Reno in “Wasabi.” And she looks prettier with long hair!

ColdFusion MX 7 on Fedora Core 6

Tue 27 Mar 2007
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Where I work, our extranet is on an external dedicated server. Sometimes we have problems with it. Just sometimes, but enough to get all of us annoyed and let my boss decide to move our extranet on our in-house servers.

We have a Windows and a Linux box. Installation CD’s available are for ColdFusion 4.5, 6, and 7. Our external server is running ColdFusion MX 6.1 on Linux.

I first tried the setup CD for version 7 on our Windows box. The setup routine would get stuck at the Web connector installation step. The cancel button was unavailable, so I just terminated the process using the Task Manager. All the files were installed, so I ran the IIS_Connectors.bat file only to encounter the same problem.

I wanted to read about the problem directly from the server, but somehow Internet Explorer 7 stopped working. Instead of dealing with it, I simply accessed Mozilla’s FTP server via the command line, downloaded Firefox, and installed it. However, the search for information about the problem was all in vain. To make matters worst, the support and search areas of Adobe.com were down for maintenance. We then gave up on installing ColdFusion on Windows.

Time to try on Linux. The installation file on the CD was corrupted, so it was impossible to install from the CD or to copy the file to the hard drive and to run it from there.

Fine! Let’s try the version 6 CD. The installation worked. But when trying to start the ColdFusion server, the libc.so.6 is never found. After reading a page at IBM, I discovered that the CF local installation of the Java Runtime Engine was at fault.

OK… What next?

The “trial” version of software available on the Adobe Web site is actually full unmodified version of their software. If you have the serial number of your software, you can always download a recent copy of it from the Adobe Web site and install the full version using your serial number.

So, I uninstalled ColdFusion MX 6 and decided to install ColdFusion MX 7 on our Linux box. However, when trying to run the installation file, I still get an error message about libc.so.6 not being found! Obviously, with my little patience, it was starting to irritate me…

Luckily, someone by the name of Steven Erat encountered the exact same problem in the same environment. Kudos to him. With his guide, I was able to install ColdFusion successfully. I recommend you follow all of his instructions as close as you can. I promise you — it will save you a lot of time and head scratching at the end.

However, the ColdFusion HTTP server somehow got setup to listen on port 8501 instead of the default 8500. After doing a quick grep, I found out that the port number is indicated in two files in /opt/coldfusionmx7: uninstall/installvariables.properties and runtime/servers/coldfusion/SERVER-INF/jrun.xml. I just used a text editor to replace every instances of 8501 to 8500. After restarted the ColdFusion server using service coldfusionmx7 restart, the server was working fine on port 8500 as it should.

When it was time to access the ColdFusion Administrator and the configure the server, the login page wouldn’t take the password I’ve specified during the installation procedure. A bug, or maybe I just forgot what I wrote. Either way, no problem. I found instructions on how to change the password of both the server and the RDS.

The ColdFusion MX 7 server now works on Apache. I just needed to tweak the configuration a bit after having applied the Apache 2.2 hotfix for ColdFusion (as Steven described) and installed the Apache connector. By personal preference, I’ve moved the ColdFusion configuration in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf to its own file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/coldfusion.conf. The Administrator was working fine, but the images were not loaded. I simply added the following line to the ColdFusion configuration in Apache and restarted the Web server:


# Below this line:

# Add the following:
Alias /CFIDE/ "/opt/coldfusionmx7/wwwroot/CFIDE/"

Apache is now working hand-in-hand with ColdFusion. The last thing to configure to work with ColdFusion was MySQL. I found a page on how to setup MySQL 4 for ColdFusion MX 7 (mirror) both on Windows and Linux. Our server has MySQL 5, but the same instructions applied.

Finally, everything works fine!

Celebrity Lookalikes

Tue 27 Mar 2007

I don’t know what to say about this…

Laziness

Tue 27 Mar 2007

Well, is this laziness, really?

I’m in one of those times, when my mood is not pushing me to do anything at all. I have many things to do at home and at work, but the inspiration doesn’t come. I don’t even have the inspiration to write here!

However, like usual, in a week or two, all the ideas I’ve been stirring in my brain will burst out and I’ll work like there’s no tomorrow!

Updating time zones information

Sat 24 Mar 2007
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With the changes to the time zones starting this year, I had to update my Web server’s time zone informations to change the time accordingly at the correct moment. To do so, I’ve performed this command:


yum -y install tzdata

More information: http://andrew.triumf.ca/dst.html

Recently...

Thu 22 Mar 2007
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Here’s what has been going on since last week:

I had a flu and everybody else in the office is getting it too! I lost two days of work and a weekend of fun because of that.

One of my Japanese friends does yoga weekly and asked me a few times to join her. I finally did. My muscles hurt. I thought yoga was super easy!

Last week on Wednesday evening, my sick body got awaken by my newer roommate’s voice talking to my other roommate. He was talking in my back, while avoiding my name like if he’ll get cursed by saying so. He claims he has no proof that we’re doing any cleaning around the house. No problem! The next Saturday, 7AM, I vacuumed every floor of the apartment. He pouted me after he woke up at the sound of the ultimate vacuum cleaner, but at least now he has a proof!

I finally bought an LCD monitor. It’s 17 inches, silver (the store had no black colour in stock), and made by LG. I also bought a black hard drive enclosure.

My private Japanese instructor lent me three versions of “The Petit Prince:” French, English, and Japanese. She asked me to practice my reading on one of the paragraphs.

I just realised the English-Canadian dictionary in Firefox doesn’t have the word “practice” in it.

I learnt a few Chinese words from a deaf Japanese girl who’s a big fan of China and one of my great friends!

I watched the movie Shinobi, which I like, because there’s Yukie Nakama in it.

And I’m about to go to work now. So, no time to write more!

2006-2007 Advanced 1 Kanji List

Mon 19 Mar 2007
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OJLS Advanced 1 students,

Here’s my Google Spreadsheet with weekly lists of kanji. (It’s not complete yet.)

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