imeem on 64-bit ubuntu

Getting flash to work correctly on 64-bit Ubuntu can be challenging. By following various blog and forum posts I was able to get it to work, but never the flash player for imeem. Every now and again I would try to re-install flash and see if it would work for imeem but until last night I was never successful. 

It turns out that imeem will only work with the 32-bit flash player. After so much work to get the 64-bit player working in Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 I did not want to remove it so I downloaded Opera and installed the 32-bit player under its plugin directory and imeem works great!

• Download and install Opera
• verify that you cannot play music in imeem
• Close Opera
• download the 32-bit flash player in '.tar.gz' format
• extract the libflashplayer.so file from the archive
• then you will need to put this in the directory /usr/lib/opera/plugins/
• you won't have permissions to write to that directory unless you are in sudo mode
• open a terminal and type 'sudo nautilus'
• copy the file into the directory (you could do this from the terminal window also probably 'sudo mv libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/opera/plugins/libflashplayer.so'
• Open Opera
• check the plugins - type opera:plugins in the address bar
• you should see Shockwave Flash and it should be pointing to the libflashplayer.so file under opera plugins, by default my opera installation was pointing to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ for the flash plugin, my guess is opera looks for plugins in its own directory and if not found then looks in mozilla directory
• you should now be able to play music with imeem!

I am running Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope by the way. Here are some links that might work to get the 64-bit player working for Firefox

• http://art.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1297385
• http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-install-adobe-flash-player-10-in-ubuntu-804-hardy-heron.html
• http://art.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1292438
• http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/install-flash-10-ubuntu-linux-64bit.html
• this last one is probably the best bet, check the comments there

Factory Girl makes rails testing so much easier

Factory Girl makes rails testing so much easier. I watched a Railscasts on Factory Girl recently but had been putting off trying it out until last week. Glad I gave it a try - now I can say good-bye to fixtures and just write my tests!

• Factory Girl
• Railscast on Factory Girl

Factory Girl is developed by thoughbot; they have some great open source projects, check out Shoulda to make your rails testing even easier.

convert mkv files to dvd with ubuntu

Turns out there is a great program for this - my guess is it works well with other formats such as avi, mpeg, etc...

DeVeDe, if you are running 9.04 (jaunty) or higher it is in the repositories

System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager

enter 'devede' in the search and then install

Attribute "target" exists, but can not be used for this element.

These days I am all about valid xhtml and was surprised to receive this validation error when using the target attribute on an anchor tag.

Attribute "target" exists, but can not be used for this element.

I found a nice work around that does not involve window.open, using jquery we can hack the attribute on 'after' the dom has loaded.

Now instead of target='_blank' you can just use class='target-blank', if the browser does not support javascript it will not open in a new window but the link will still work - and we have our valid xhtml.

Resources

• cre8asiteforums
• W3C Markup Validation Service
• JQuery

Procedure sp_droplogin, Line 93 Login is aliased or mapped to a user in one or more database(s)

Trying to remove a MSSQL login from a database server, recieve the following eror

Msg 15175, Level 16, State 1, Procedure sp_droplogin, Line 93
Login 'qa' is aliased or mapped to a user in one or more database(s). Drop the user or alias before dropping the login.

Solution: run this command to determine what alias or groups the login is associated with and then remove those; might be nice if they just added this to the error message?

sp_helpuser 'qa'

scrolling screen shot on ubuntu

I've been using ubuntu for the last 6 months, really like it! But also really missing SnagIt :(

so far I have come across these screen shot tools

• built in 'save screen' program - read this post for info about that and others
• Shutter

but none that I came across would do scrolling screen shots; currently I only needed scrolling screen shots of web pages and I just came across a great tool for that - a firefox add-on called Abduction, it is really easy to use.

For full page screen shots (including all scrollable regions) or for cropped sections of a page. Just right click on the page and select 'Save Page as Image', if you are over an 'element' it will auto select that as the cropped area, you can then adjust the crop and save, if you want the entire page the easiest seems to be right clicking where there are no elements below the mouse and then adjust the fully selected page as needed

The saved png can then be opened in Shutter for applying arrows, boxes, etc...