Simon Rycroft's musings » Simon Rycroft

AMD64 Ubuntu and Zend Studio 6

Simon Rycroft — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:43:56 +0000

As a relatively new convert to Debian/Ubuntu, I found the process of getting Zend Studio 6 to run on my machine a little tricky. What I ended up doing was the following:# Install sun-jre sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin # Install libraries to allow 32bit software to run # (not sure whether all are necessary) sudo apt-get install ia32-libs lib32asound2 util-linux # Finally install Zend using the installed JRE sudo ./ZendStudioForEclipse-6_1_0.bin LAX_VM /usr/bin/java
If the final install fails, it may be because /usr/bin/java isn’t pointing at the Sun version of java, you can check this by doing the following:java -versionwhich should output something likejava version "1.6.0_06" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_06-b02) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 10.0-b22, mixed mode)If it doesn’t, you’ll need to change where the symbolic link /etc/alternatives/java points to.cd /etc/alternatives rm java ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java

Bluetooth OS X

Simon Rycroft — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:37:01 +0000

Holy cow, this took me far too long to locate. Why is OSX’s ability to receive files via Bluetooth hobbled under the sharing settings?

Zero Spam

Simon Rycroft — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:17:45 +0000

I’m now close to 100% confident that we’ve managed to cut out spam completely on the Scratchpads. We’re doing this using two modules, Hashcash (as mentioned previously on this blog), and Mollom.

What’s Mollom? Well, it’s a spam detection service which implements its own Captcha on a site if it thinks some content posted is spam. It’s the one module I’d now recommend all Drupal installations shouldn’t be without.

Hashcash

Simon Rycroft — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:00:53 +0000

I’ve raved about how good the Wordpress Hashcash plugin is before, so I decided to implement it for Drupal (http://drupal.org/project/hashcash). I’ve got it installed on the fifty plus sites I manage, and so far it seems to be doing its thing. I’ll post here with updates if it does anything silly!

Current work

Simon Rycroft — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:18:24 +0000

I just thought I’d post a comment on my own blog, partly to keep this thing going, and partly to play around with the trackback functionality provided by WP and Drupal. I’m really quite enjoying the work that we’re doing at the moment with David Remsen of GBIF. It’s nothing too complicated, but I feel it will help form the backbone of further interesting work.

BT incompetence

Simon Rycroft — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 11:47:27 +0000

I received the following in my mail this morning:

Thank you for your email regarding online billing.

In response to you email, I have checked your account and it shows your telephone number is alloted this BT Account number. Furthermore, I would like to inform you that account may not be registered online due to technical error.

I hope this information satisfies your query.

I hope this information satisfies your query… what do you bloody think?

Imagex

Simon Rycroft — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 01:14:15 +0000

Just felt I should shout about the new module I’ve developed for Drupal. It extends the Image module to make adding large numbers of images even simpler than before. It, of course, uses Postlet for the image upload, and then a tiny smattering of jQuery for the dynamic page refresh.

Drupal module weight

Simon Rycroft — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:53:01 +0000

I just had to write a quick post having scratched my head over this one for a little too long.

Basically, within Drupal I’d wanted to change the order that the hook_form_alter hooks were executed. In order to do this all you need to do is to set the “weight” of the module in question to a greater value. In our example, I wanted my module to execute its code after the location module. The location module has a weight of 0 (the default), so simply be setting mine to 1 its code was executed after the location module’s code.

England

Simon Rycroft — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 22:54:33 +0000

Well, I’ve just watched my team slump to their lowest point for some years, there is nothing more that can be said, other than “Bollocks!”.

Online again

Simon Rycroft — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 02:33:00 +0000

At long last the server is back online. It only two two months for BT to pull their fingers from out of their arses, but now that it has been done, I can almost forgive them (almost, but not quite). This one’s to the guy that I told was “Useless” – thanks for nothing you…