So I decided to contact Oracle support about the issue. Get this! (I wish I had saved a screenshot of the issue, because it would have been a good thing to post here.) The support guy told me that I should uninstall the Jre and reinstall the jre. What the fuck kind of solution is that!?

Seriously Oracle, what Douchebaggotry is this shit!?

By the way, this worked. I uninstalled the jre, ran cclean, and reinstalled the jre. Things are working fine now.

Macbook Keyboard - missing 8 key

So this weekend I headed to my sisters house to take care of her animals while she’s at Mexico Beach for a triathlon. Well I left the room this morning for 5 minutes and my laptop was on the floor closed. When I opened it up the 8 key was missing and could not be found! I’ve searched and searched, the only thing I can figure is one of the dogs popped the key off and ate it! So I did a few google searched and found out that it would cost me about $225 to replace the kayboard or I could replace it myself for far less.

A few more google searches later and I found a youtube video of a guy replacing a single key on the macbook, so I found this site called “WeLoveMacs” and purchased an 8 key from them for about $16. Now I wait for my new 8 key to come in so I can stop hitting that little rubber thing.

Here’s a post with the same question on this issue straight from mozillas website..

http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=ro&forumId=1&comments_parentId=399203

For those who are interested, I finally managed to clear the shit. I removed firefox, ran cclean and reinstalled firefox. Something is wrong with firefox.  Also I switched it so firefox is always in secure browsing mode. For those who are paranoid like me, just leave the stupid thing in secure browsing mode.

#!/bin/bash

API=”http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml”
DATA=”"
USER=”fefeman”
PASS=”"
FILE=$1

if [ $# = 0 ]; then
echo “USE: ”
echo “post.sh file”
echo ” ”
echo “file is the name of the file you wish to post to twitter.”
exit 1
fi

# split the file into 139character cunks for twitter
base64 $1  | split -C 139

# post initial file information
DATA=”Posting file: $FILE base 64 encoded for your pleasure!”
wget –user=$USER –password=$PASS –post-data=”status=$DATA” $API
DATA=”"

# output files are in x* format so to make things simple
# we’ll just list all of the x* files
for f in ./x*
do
DATA=`cat $f`
wget –user=$USER –password=$PASS –post-data=”status=$DATA” $API
rm -rf update.xml
done

# post initial file information
DATA=”End of file: $FILE ”
wget –user=$USER –password=$PASS –post-data=”status=$DATA” $API

rm -rf x*

It’s got a few bugs but its a good proof of concept. Several such bugs are:

• If wget cannot hit the page for whatever reason then the script will continue on to the next 139 bytes of the file
• There maybe issues with wget posting in the wrong order. (I noticed multiple update.xml files in the output directory which means either previous update.xml files didnt get removed probably due to multitasking  problems??)

*

Thank you for taking the time to contact T-Mobile. Below you will see the Instructions for unlocking your HTC device.

1. Insert the foreign SIM card
2. Power on the device and the display should read “Please input unlock code”
3. Enter the unlock code and the device should display “Phone is unlocked.”
4. Allow the phone to scan the network (or manually click on the antenna icon to do this)

It is very important that the instructions and SIM unlock code are entered correctly as listed. If you receive an error message while performing the instructions do not make any further attempts to unlock the handset. Please be aware that if an excessive amount of incorrect attempts are made, the phone will be permanently locked. You will need to verify the IMEI by pressing *#06# and contact Customer Care for support.

Here’s something entertaining to check out. Hannah Montanna Linux, it seems someone has created their own themed Hanna Montanna linux, but don’t let it fool you, its really just kbuntu themed. For a good laugh http://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/Site/Home.html here’s  a review of it (I like the comments at the bottom the best): http://desktoplinuxreviews.com/2009/07/27/hannah-montana-linux/

So today I was in much need of an ftp program for linux. Up until now I’ve been just using the commandline ftp client for transferring files. If I needed to transfer more then a few files I’d just tar them up before sending them. Well this process works until you need to transfer files to a windows machine. So I googled a bit and found out that my favoriate ftp client for windows is also avaliable for linux! Filezilla! You can download it from their website or if you have ubuntu/debian apt-get install filezilla. It adds itself to the internet folder under the applications drop downmenu.

# xorg.conf (X.Org X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file works with a Samsung SyncMaster 245BW monitor and an
# nVidia Quadra FX 3450 video card, connected by an analog cable
# via an analog/DVI splitter under Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. 5/21/08.
#
# If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
# again, run the following command:
# sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Monitor “SyncMaster”
Device “Generic Video Card”
SubSection “Display”
Modes “1920×1200″ “1600×1200″ “1280×1024″ “1280×960″ “1152×864″ “1024×768″ “800×600″ “640×480″
EndSubSection
Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “True”
Defaultdepth 24
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier “Generic Video Card”
Driver “nvidia”
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Generic Keyboard”
Driver “kbd”
Option “XkbRules” “xorg”
Option “XkbModel” “pc104″
Option “XkbLayout” “us”
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Configured Mouse”
Driver “mouse”
Option “CorePointer”
EndSection

Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Default Layout”
screen “Default Screen” 0 0
Inputdevice “Generic Keyboard”
Inputdevice “Configured Mouse”
EndSection

Section “Module”
Load “glx”
EndSection

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “SyncMaster”
Horizsync 30.0 - 81.0
Vertrefresh 56.0 - 75.0
Option “DPMS”
EndSection

Section “Extensions”
Option “Composite” “Enable”
EndSection

Also I had to run auto fit on the monitor for the screen to be sized correctly.

Welcome to the DOS new users guide. In this guide I try to give the reader just enough information to start using DOS efficiently. This is by no means an extensive guide and it is only meant to get the reader familure with DOS. DOS is not hard to learn and there are graphical interfaces to help you out if you’re interested, but most of DOS’s power is in the commandline. Besides, It only takes a limited number of commands to use DOS efficiently and these commands could be learned in a day.

To help give you a full idea of what happens when you use DOS I’ll explain what happens when your computer boots all the way up to when DOS is loaded as well as some of what DOS does at boot up. Then I’ll explain a few commands to get you fimilure with DOS so that you may feel at home using it on a daily basis.

Let’s begin with the power on button. When you turn your computer on by pressing the power button the electrical components in your computer power up. One of the first of these components to power up is the BIOS. The BIOS is the basic communication block between your computers hardware (keyboard, mouse, soundcard, modem, floppy drive, etc..) and your computers operating system (in this case DOS). For more information on the BIOS, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS.

Once the BIOS boots then, depending on what you’re settings are, it searches for a boot sector on your harddrive, cdrom drive, or floppy drive. The boot sector is a small bit of code written (usually by your operating system, DOS) in a special memory space on your drive. Once the boot sector is found it’s then placed into memory and then executed by the computer. To learn more about boot sectors and boot strapping see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(computing).

In our case we have a DOS boot sector and once it’s placed into memory DOS loads two files. The first file is the config.sys file. This file usually contains device drivers like cdrom, network and sound card drivers. Once the config.sys is loaded the autoexec.bat file is loaded. Usually the autoexec.bat file can contain device drivers much like the config.sys as well as user configuration settings, such as prompt type, environment variables and other customizations a user may wish to make.

After the autoexec.bat is loaaded, DOS then displays the command prompt:

<C:\>

followed by a blinking cursor. At this point DOS is waiting for commands from the user, that means you! From the prompt you can perform basic file operations such as copying files, moving files, ranaming files or listing files.

Before we begin with how to perform these operations it’s a good idea to get an understanding of how DOS organizes files. DOS stores files onto drives. Drives are usually named by a letter followed by a colon. For example, floppy drives are usually A: or B:, the harddrive is C: and the CDROM drive is D:. You can access different drives in DOS by typing the drive letter followed by the colon and pressing return.
Example of a user changing drive to A: and back to C: in DOS.
<C:\TMP>a:
<A:\>c:
<C:\TMP>

On each drive there may also be directories. Directories are just like they sound, it’s a way of organizing files into a logical structure. For example, in the following structure:

C Drive
|
±GAMES directory
|
±DOOM directory
|
±DOOM.EXE
±DOOM.WAD
±README.TXT
±…

the drive C contains the GAMES directory and within the GAMES directory there is a DOOM directory. Just like the DOOM directory contains the files DOOM.EXE, DOOM.WAD and README.TXT other directories can contain files as well. These files and directories can be organized in any way that the user wants or needs.

Now back to the command prompt with a little explination:

C:     \     >_

^      ^     waiting for your command
|      |
|      root directory
|
drive C

The C: denotes the drive that you’re currently on, from there the / shows you the current directory. The prompt is there as a friendly reminder to the user as to where they are on the drive. The prompt can also be changed by typing PROMPT followed by any number of command switches, which I won’t go into on the tutorial. Type PROMPT /? for more information on the PROMPT command.

Now for you’re first command, the DIR command! The DIR command is short for directory listing. The DIR command lists files and directories within the current directory. For example, if you’re at <C:\> and you type DIR you may get something similar to the following:

C:\>DIR
Volume in drive C is mu/drives/c

Directory of C:\

CONFIG   SYS           346  11-10-08  8:19p
TMP                  <DIR>  05-25-09  6:57p
AUTOEXEC BAT           556  11-10-08  8:19p
2 file(s)            902 bytes
1 dir(s)   2,147,450,880 bytes free

The command above shows all files and directories within the current directory (C:\). Two files are listed above, CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT and one directory is listed TMP. The files are followed by a size in bytes. The CONFIG.SYS is 346 bytes big and the AUTOEXEC.BAT is 556 bytes big. The date to the right of each file is the last modification date. The rest is self explanitory, total bytes taken by files, total bytes free, number of files and number of directories.

Like most DOS commands DIR can take a number of arguements as input. Arguements are usually passed in with a / character. For example to list directories in a wide format type DIR /W. If you’re curious to know about the other arguements to DIR or any other command just type the command followed by a /?. For example, DIR /?:

C:\>DIR /?
Displays a list of files and subdirectories in a directory.

DIR [drive:][path][filename] [/P] [/W] [/A[[:]attributes]]
[/O[[:]sortorder]] [/S] [/B] [/L] [/V]

[drive:][path][filename]
Specifies drive, directory, and/or files to list.
(Could be enhanced file specification or multiple filespecs.)
/P         Pauses after each screenful of information.
/W         Uses wide list format.
/A         Displays files with specified attributes. (Defaults to /ADHSRA)
attributes  D  Dire……..

The next thing you’ll probably want to do is be able to navigate into different directories. To do this we use the Change Directory, CD or CHDIR command. CD and CHDIR do the same but I like to use the CD command since it’s much shorter to type on the command line then CHDIR. To use the CD command type CD followed by the path that you wish to change to. For example if I wanted to navigate to the directory C:\GAMES\DOOM I’d type (at the C prompt):

<C:\>CD \GAMES\DOOM\

Followed by the enter key. DOS changes the directory which is reflected on the command prompt:

<C:\GAMES\DOOM>

Unlike the DIR command the CD command does not really give any indication of what happened. This is why the prompt is so useful and what it’s used for. Oh, by the way another useful tip CD .. changes to the previous directory.

Now that you can list directories and files, change directories and change drives you maybe interested in creating directories and removing directories. Well these commands are easy to use, just follow along. At the C: prompt (or any other drive for that matter) you can create a directory. Let’s say we need a directory to store your pictures from your digital camera. Let’s call this directory PICTURES.

To create the directory just type the Make Dir command, MKDIR followed by the directory path and name. For example:

<C:\>MKDIR PICTURES
or
<C:\>MKDIR C:\PICTURES

Both of the commands create the directory PICTURES in C:\.

Well that’s great! Now you have a directory to store your pictures, next you’ll need to copy them in from a floppy drive. So you pop the floppy disk into the drive.

Upon receiving the switch I opened the package, this particular model comes with 4 kvm cables, one for each port. The kvm does not require any external power to work, so I did not need to worry about which device to unplug from the wall socket. I plugged the switch into my linux box and then plugged one of the ports into my tv tuner box (which has vga out).

Then I powered up my linux box. Things went along fine for a while, but I wanted to see if the tv tuner would work so I switched to the tuner. Bam! The tuner worked perfectly even though the switch did not have the keyboard our mouse ps2 sockets plugged into the switch for that particular port.

I watched a few tv commercials in discust and switched back to linux. Then back to slashdot, I followed a few links and then my mouse started acting odd! Everytime I’d scroll up the browser would go to the previous page!

Upset, I decided to google for some answers and I found some.

The reason the mouse gets all wonkey after a switch is because the switch disconnects the mouse from power completely. For usb mice and mice with scroll wheels there are two modes that the mouse can be used in, basic and advanced. The basic mode only allows three basic mouse buttons and the advanced mode allows more buttons such as scroll, scroll click, and the left and right thumb buttons.

When the mouse gets disconnected it looses power and gets put back into the basic mode. This causes some os’s to get a little weird because they still “think” the mouse is still in advanced mode. This causes the mouse to act spirraticly sometimes causeing the mouse to track wrong or click incorrectly.

In linux there are settings that you can set in your kernel or modprobe.conf to fix this issue. In my case I used:

options psmouse proto=exps
options psmouse resetafter=10

This tells the psmouse module to use the exp protocol, and after 10 bad packets reset the mouse driver.

My only concern now is, will my mouse get all weird in dos now? Will I have to save up and purchase a better kvm to get the mouse to work in dos? Only time will tell. I get my old 486 dos computer Friday. Sometime next week I’ll update this post with my findings.

More information on the mouse/kvm issue can be found at Erratic Mouse Behaviour with mouse… website.

The ebay user had it listed for a price of over $300 with a buy it now of $375. Wickedly-Fast 486 at the price of a new netbook. I laughed for about 5 minutes over that one.

The specs for this michine were quite a read though, but I was still not convenced it was worth over $150. It had a new AT case, 515mb harddrive, a 5 & 1/4 floppy, 3.1/2 floppy, cdrom as well as 32mb of ram. None if this really impressed me . What impressed me was the sound blaster awe 32 (confirmed to work in dos) sound card and the motherboard which had three pci slots! With one free pci slot I could put this 486 on the network with a little effort.

Taking advice from a business class I took in college I decided to contact the seller even though he didn’t have the “Make an offer” button on the listing.

Dear socaleer,
Hello,
I’d like to purchase this system, however I feel that your asking too much. Can you make the price negotiable?
Thanks
-fefe_l33t

At first I decided to see if he’s willing to haggle for the computer. I realized that at the price he’s asking for this system he’s not likely to get any buyers for the first listing, so I had a little more wiggle room as far as negotiations.

Dear fefe_l33t,
I may have some flexibility in price at the low-end, but not too much. This is the ultimtate fast 486 system in a brand new case, with new power supply, and a combo floppy drive so it has real value. What are you willing to offer?
-socaleer

This guy is ridiculous, he thinks he’s got hot shit listed on ebay. But I know better then that. My offer was intentionally low and I did not want to hint to him what I was really after (the soundcard and motherboard). I don’t care much for an old keyboard, mouse or crappy old software like windows 3.1, so I took off the items I care less about.

Dear socaleer,
Since most netbooks are around $275, I’ll offer 150$ for the lot without keyboard, mouse or software.
-fefe_l33t

I thought netbooks as a basis for the purchase price was a good idea, especially since everyone wants a netbook these days and they are extreamly cheap.

Dear fefe_l33t,
Tell you what, $160.00 and you have a deal. My PCs are very well-packed (see my feeback) and ship via FedEx, fully insured, with tracking info sent to you. If you agree on $160.00, let me know and I will edit the auction ASAP to a $160.00 BIN auction for the PC only. Regards…
-socaleer

$160, I can handle that. So I accepted his offer, he changed the price listed and now I have a 486 on the way.

In case your curious, that advice I spoke about from the business class (see above) was, “All prices are negotiable”

I looked in my room,

I looked in my kitchen!

I looked in Dalton’s room,

I looked in my family room!!

I was about to give up until… until!

I heard it, I heard it calling from the fridge.

I walked up to the fridge door, put my hand on the door and opened it.

And there it was! Staring at me, that gooey, sticky, peanutty butter.

I stared back.

and it sat there. It did nothing.

I winced at it, and it did nothing.

I grabbed it! It did nothing.

and then!

and then!

I opened it, took a spoon and dipped it in the peanut butter.

Yum! It was good.

The first game I tried was Beneath a Steel Sky, it’s free for download once you sign up for an account. The game uses SCUMMVM which has been ported for Windows, Linux and many other operating systems (I think even palmos!). SCUMMVM is an old adventure game engine origonally written for games such as Indianna Jones and The Fate of Atlantis, the Kings Quest series and many other classic adventure games.

The hard part was getting the game files out of the executable that GOG gives you. During inspection of the exe with a hexeditor I noticed that it was written using the borland installer. Unfortunatly, I know very little about the format and instead of fiddling with the game I decided to run it in wine. As WINE’s site says, wine is not an emulator. Wine allows windows executables to run natively on linux (and other operating systems) with a little work.

When I ran the setup program in wine some of the fonts were a bit screwy and the screen was kind of off, but it was enough to get the game extracted from the executable.

The next thing I had to do was run SCUMMVM and get the game setup and running. When I launched ScummVM it had a start up menu. In this menu I selected “Add Game…” then I browsed to the installation directory of Beneath a Steel Sky (/home/<login>/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/GOG.com/), selected Beneath a Steel Sky then clicked “Choose”. I selected DOS for the platform and clicked “OK”.

Once the game setup was done I clicked “Start” and enjoyed Beneath a Steel Sky without ever having to touch Windows.

Screenshot of Beneath a Steel Sky

$ objdump -D ./eschalon_book_1_demo

./eschalon_book_1_demo:     file format elf32-i386
Disassembly of section .interp:

08048134 <.interp>:
8048134:    2f                       das
8048135:    6c                       insb   (%dx),%es:(%edi)
8048136:    69 62 2f 6c 64 2d 6c     imul   $0x6c2d646c,0x2f(%edx),%esp
804813d:    69 6e 75 78 2e 73 6f     imul   $0x6f732e78,0×75(%esi),%ebp
8048144:    2e 32 00                 xor    %cs:(%eax),%al

Disassembly of section .note.ABI-tag:

08048148 <.note.ABI-tag>:
8048148:    04 00                    add    $0×0,%al
804814a:    00 00                    add    %al,(%eax)
804814c:    10 00                    adc    %al,(%eax)
804814e:    00 00                    add    %al,(%eax)
8048150:    01 00                    add    %eax,(%eax)
8048152:    00 00                    add    %al,(%eax)
8048154:    47                       inc    %edi

I only used eschalon because it’s a fun game. Don’t worry, there isn’t much here to reconstruct any bit of the game, besides this is the demo which can be found on basilisk’s website.

Next I’m going to try my hand at assembly on linux, if not in a DOS emulator. I hear dosemu is a well respected emulator.

This hack works with the T-Mobile phones. You can see my other Android articles to figure out howto get a develpment environment setup.

The first step was to get a java runtime and SDK installed in a local user account onto my laptop without using apt (since this as a ubuntu laptop). I downloaded the java jdk1.6.0_13 from sun’s website. I selected the Java SE standard edition since I’m not doing any enterprise development.

Installation was easy, just give the binary execute permissions and run it.

chmod u+x jdk-6u13-linux-i586.bin
./jdk-6u13-linux-i586.bin
mv jdk1.6.0_13 ~/

I agreed to the really long terms by typing “yes” and the binary extracted the jdk into the current directory. Once the jdk was extracted I movied it into the root of my home directory (~).

The jvm needs to be in the path environment variable so that eclipse and other applications can see the runtime. So I edited my .bashrc and added the following lines at the bottom:

export JAVA_HOME=/home/fefe/jdk1.6.0_13
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin

Once placed into the .bashrc I restarted the terminal so that it would take on the new environment variables. (/home/fefe is my home directory, replace this with your home directory,~).

The second thing I needed was the google Android SDK. I downloaded version 1.5 of the SDK from the Andriod Developers website. I then unzipped the SDK into my home directory (~) since everything in this setup is meant to be ran from a single user. Once unzipped I checked to see if  “adb” the Google Android Debugger is working.

cd ~/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r1/tools
./adb

Adb spits out a rather lengthy output when no parameters are passed, I didn’t paste them here because it would make the article longer then needed.

Once ADB is installed and working this too needs to be placed into the path environment variable. The procedure is the same as above, here are the lines that I replaced the previous lines with in the .bashrc file.

export JAVA_HOME=/home/fefe/jdk1.6.0_13
export PATH=$PATH:/home/fefe/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r1/tools:$JAVA_HOME/bin

Don’t forget to change the /home/fefe portion to your /home/login (~) and restart the terminal or the environment variables wont work. You can test these environment variables by changing to the root of your home directory and typing “adb” (for andriod development kit) and “java” for the java runtime (jdk).

Next eclipse was downlaoded and installed. I grabbed the java-ganymede-SR2-linux-gtk build from eclipse’s website. Then I extracted the tar gzip to my home directory (~).

Since this particular version of eclipse requires a java jdk to run I was unable to run eclipse without first creating a script to change the path environment variables to point to the java jdk and the android sdk. Here’s what my script looks like:

#!/bin/bash
export JAVA_HOME=/home/fefe/jdk1.6.0_13
export PATH=$PATH:/home/fefe/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r1/tools:$JAVA_HOME/bin
~/eclipse/eclipse

Don’t forget to chmod u+x on this script so that it will run.

Once the JDK, Android SDK and Eclipse were setup, the next step I needed to do was to get the eclipse google android plugin working. This part was sort of a pain since google’s website was down and there didn’t seem to be a single mirror of the plugin anywhere on the internet. I had to wait a day before I could actually finish this part. (if you have this problem comment here and I’ll happily send you the plugin I used).

To setup the plugin, I opened eclipse by running the script created above. When eclipse opens click Help->Software Updates. This opens the software updates dialog. In the dialog I clicked “Add site” and pasted “http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/” into the dialog, without the quotes and clicked OK. The dialog refreshed and the link showed up in the pane with other links. I click on the arrow to the left of the link and eclipse fetched the repository information from google’s website. (If this part fails I can provide you with the plugin if you comment)

I placed a check mark next to everything in the google repository and clicked the “Install” button on the right. This took a while and I had to restart eclipse, but once it finished I had a working development environment for the google android phone!

In the next Android article I’ll setup a simple “HelloWorld” application, run it in the andriod virtual machine and then push it to my phone.

The first thing I did before I even got it home was look for a way to get root. After much googleing I found a root hack. The root hack required me to hit the home key, press enter twice, type “telnetd” and then press enter again. This runs a telnet daemon in the background. Once I did this I grabbed a special telnet client someone hacked up and got root. I installed busybox and started wgetting all kinds of updates and patches.

I texted Alan and he was so excited that he asked me to come over. So today I went over to his house and spent half the day trying to get his phone to load the latest firmware while also trying to get a development environment setup on my Linux laptop.

Neither ended up succeeding very well. We were unable to get Alan’s phone updated, no matter what firmware we tried the phone either crashed (and we had to reset it) or the phone said there was an invalid signature. Then while trying to get a development environment onto my phone Google’s Android Eclipse plugin website went down and was down the whole time I was at Alan’s house.

Unfortunately, it’s late, so I’m going to get some sleep and perhapse I’ll do a follow up article on this, or I’ll edit this article and add more information. Today was a long day and there’s still yet more to be learned about the Android phone that I now carry in my pocket.

In the previous article I setup a working development environment on Windows. In this article I’ll setup my environment get a copy of Mozilla Firefox compiled and running from Mercurial. Mercurial is Mozilla’s CVS and comes with the (already installed) Mozilla Build package.

After testing that hg is working:

$ hg

Mercurial Distributed SCM

basic commands:

add        add the specified files on the next commit
annotate   show changeset information per file line
clone      make a copy of an existing repository
commit     commit the specified files or all outstanding changes
diff       diff repository (or selected files)
export     dump the header and diffs for one or more changesets
init       create a new repository in the given directory
log        show revision history of entire repository or files
merge      merge working directory with another revision
parents    show the parents of the working dir or revision
pull       pull changes from the specified source
push       push changes to the specified destination
remove     remove the specified files on the next commit
serve      export the repository via HTTP
status     show changed files in the working directory
update     update working directory

use “hg help” for the full list of commands or “hg -v” for details

I checked out Mozilla Firefox 3.5 into the c:/191src directory (as recommended by the wiki):

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-1.9.1/ c:/191src

This step took quite sometime (as the wiki mentioned) so I stepped away, grabbed a drink and did a few things around the house before returning to the computer.

Next I created my .mozconfig file and placed it into c:/191src. This file tells configure and make what options should be used to build mozilla. The descriptions for each item in this file are rather long, so I’ll link to the page describing how to make it. Here’s the one that I build for my project:

# kg4cjv’s mozilla config version .1
ac_add_options –enable-application=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser

This config does not contain any debug information, the  Configuring Build Options wiki article explains how to setup this file properly for building a debug browser.

After the config is made building is required. So I ran the following command:

make -f client.mk build

Make was trucking along doing its thing when it hit an error:

configure: error: System header atlbase.h is not available. See http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/atlbase.h for details on fixing this problem.
*** Fix above errors and then restart with “make -f client.mk build”
make[1]: *** [configure] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/c/191src’
make: *** [/c/191src/Makefile] Error 2

So of course I hit the website provided above and found out that this library is only included with the professional version of the Microsoft Visual C++, which I don’t have. ATL is only used for a small portion of the code and can be disabled, so I modified my config file to not include this portion of the code:

# kg4cjv’s mozilla config version .1
ac_add_options –enable-application=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser
ac_add_options –disable-xpconnect-idispatch
ac_add_options –disable-activex
ac_add_options –disable-activex-scripting
ac_add_options –disable-accessibility

Make tucked along after this for quite sometime and finally after about an hour of waiting it’s time to make the installer:

make -C browser/installer installer

Now it’s ready to be installed and ran from  dist/install/sea/firefox-3.5b5pre.en-US.win32.installer.exe!!

Per suggestion of a co-worker I thought I’d pitch in a little with the Mozilla Development team with Firefox. A little C++ will help me brush up my development skills as well as learning how to use the newest Microsoft development tools.

Mozilla’s website is very extensive and a bit daunting and setting up a working development environment is a bit difficult. So I decided to document a bit about how I got my development environment working on my Windows XP SP3 system.

The wiki suggests that Windows XP developers need to install Visual Studio. I had visual studio 6 somewhere, but as I read more of the wiki I found out that the Express version of visual c++ 9 (2008) would be easier to get a development environment setup on. Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express can be downloaded at Microsoft’s Express Edition website.

The installer for the Express edition of Visual C++ is only a client for downloading the full application. It only took me about 10 or 15 minutes to download the installation. The installation consists of approximately 100MB of installation media. The installation prompted to install an Express edition of the Microsoft SQL Server, the Mozilla wiki said that this installation is not necessary, so I didn’t bother to waste time downloading it.

Once Visual Studio was installed and working the next step was to install the Windows VISTA SDK. Don’t ask me why my Microsoft Windows XP SP2 installation needs an installation of the VISTA SDK to do development on Firefox,. Or even how it’s possible that my OS didn’t complain that I was installing a development SDK for an OS that is not installed, for that matter.

I browsed to the Vista SDK website and had to validate my computer with some strange application plugin. This installation is just another one of those downloaders that Microsoft seems to have an abundance of. So upon starting this installation I was prompted as to what should be installed. I selected everything, by default it left off some of the x64 bit stuff. Even though I have a 32bit processor I figured that I might want to do some cross platform compilations.

This installation is rather large and has over 1.5gb of files to download. As I selected the options for installation it calculated to installation time and size, it said it would take 5 weeks to download the installation. But once the download actually started the status bar shot to the 100% mark and stayed there. So far an hour has gone by and it’s still downloading with 0% left to go.

After the download and installation of the VISTA SDK, next I installed the Mozilla Build 1.3 package. The Mozilla Build package contains a shell, CVS and other necessary free or open source development tools required to build a successful Mozilla browser on Windows. Consider it an all in one development add-on to Visual Studio to get a working Mozilla development environment.

I downloaded the Mozilla Build package and started the installation. The Mozilla Wiki suggested that I leave the installation location and settings default so I did the usual next, next, next… finish. By default everything gets put into the directory “C:\mozilla-build”.

The wiki had me run the exe “C:\mozilla-build\start-msvc9.bat” for visual studio 2009 express edition.This executes a MINGW32 shell for developing Mozilla packages. With this running the only thing left to do is get the Mozilla Firefox source from CVS and try to build it. I’ll leave that for the next article.

This is a multi-part article, see part 2

“You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.”

A few searches and I found some posts pointing towards the issue. Sometimes during wordpress installations the install does not complete, so you have to forece it to complete. I found a neat little utility someone wrote to force wordpress to update. So I grabbed it throw it on the server and ran it. It said that it completed successfully, so I hit the admin page and nothing. The blog still gave me the annoying error.

Off to google again, I went searching for possible solutions to my problem. I had no success, but then I remembered that I had edited the wordpress config to add the following lines:

“define(‘AUTH_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’);
define(‘SECURE_AUTH_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’);
define(‘LOGGED_IN_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’);
define(‘NONCE_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’);”

During the upgrade the documentation said to place these entries into my config file. They had a neat utility to auto generate the unique phrase, for which I took complete advantage of. The kicker is, they forgot to mention that these lines needed to be above the line:

“/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */”

So, I copied the unique phrase lines above this line, saved the file and tried logging back into wordpress and it worked! And yes, I’m happily blogging.