John's Blog

This has bugged me for a very long time. Could never get this to work - had to watch ESPN live inside a Windows VM. I don't know how universal or even how long lived this solution will be but for now it's working.  Google-Chrome Version -  Version 23.0.1271.97 OS - Fedora 17 x86_64 Flash Plugins - see below - I had two versions installed. I disabled the  11.5.31.5 version and left the  11.   2r202 version enabled and things finally started working for me. Also enabled chrome popups for espn.go.com. Unfortunately not currently working for me on Fedora 18 :( Adobe Flash Player   (2 files)   -  Version:   11.2 r202 Shockwave Flash 11.2 r202 Name: Shockwave Flash Description: Shockwave Flash 11.5 r31 Version: 11.5.31.5 Location: /opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so Type: PPAPI (out-of-process) Enable MIME types: MIME type Description File extensions application/x-shock...

Making sure KVM tools not pointing to the wrong (vbox) URI I decided to try the Fedora 17 command line kvm (libvirtd) tools to create a Fedora 18 virtual machine. This was met with failure, although for some reason the GUI tool, virt-manager, worked fine for this purpose. (I still don't know why the GUI "just worked", when the command line did not - I guess it assumes the correct URI while the command line tools do not.) I was following the Fedora VM "Getting Started" guide found here  and even the simplest commands resulted in failure. # virt-install --prompt ERROR    Error in network device parameters: Virtual network 'default' does not exist: An error occurred, but the cause is unknown # virsh dumpxml default error: failed to get domain 'default' error: An error occurred, but the cause is unknown # virsh net-list --all Name                 State      Autostart ---------------------------------------...

While using Deja Dup to do a "Restore Single File" operation from within Nautilus into /etc/cups/ppd, which is owned by root, I encountered an error.  Deja Dup finds the file and tries to do the restore operation, but fails due to "cannot create directory" error. Deja Dup needs to create a temporary directory into which the restored file is temporarily placed. If Deja Dup doesn't have write permission in this directory the restore operation will therefore fail with the "cannot create directory" message. I probably could have run Deja Dup as root but maybe that's not such a good idea for one thing, and also I would have had to reenter the info regarding the access key etc. This info is already in Deja Dup if it runs in normal user mode. There also doesn't seem to be a way when running in this mode to have Deja Dup place the restored file in some other directory  (/tmp/ or /home/me/tmp) other than the canonical one (i.e. the original locati...

Help, I'm composing a message in Thunderbird, I've pasted information in the form of a table, and I can't get out! Even information that does not appear to be a "table" may in fact have the HTML attributes of a table. Once you paste that info into a Thunderbird message no amount of mousing, tabbing, or other standard UI type manipulations will get you "out" of that table and allow you to add more information to the message you are composing. Have a look at this Mozilla Bug #535475 . The workaround therein provided is surprisingly easy. Select the entire text with Menu | Edit | "Select All".  Menu | Insert | HTML to get an HTML editing window. Add a "<BR>" HTML element where it is needed (typically before or after the table). Continue creating your message having freed yourself from the table that had previously constrained you.

While using Quicken 2010 I got repeated OL-293-A errors when uploading bill pay transactions to a bank (or to a Financial Institution or "FI" as Intuit like to say). Downloading transactions worked fine as did access via the bank's website. The printed message that accompanies the OL-293-A says something to the effect of the server at the bank has issued an unexpected response - try again later. In essence, an EAGAIN. Calling the bank for support (Are they experiencing other outages? Are they in a maintenance window?) was not helpful and it didn't seem that they were aware of any systemic problem. You can look at your "conn" and "OFX" logs from inside of Quicken (I think it's Help | customer support | logs) and this showed more detail - in fact the OFX is a complete XML record of every packet sent and received, while the conn is more concise and a bit more readable. You can see other error values being returned in these logs but it all ca...

The behavior of Gnome 3 with more than one monitor is a bit counterintuitive, at least for me. Depending on the value of gsettings set org.gnome.shell.overrides workspaces-only-on-primary you get one of two behaviors. If this variable is set to " true " (default) then however many workspaces you may happen to have on your "main" monitor, you always get and see the same workspace on the external monitor. So you as you navigate up and down on the main monitor, what you see on the external monitor never changes.  So you get N + 1 workspaces, where N is the number on the main monitor and the 1 neverchanging workspace lives on the external monitor. If, on the other hand, this variable is set to " false" , than you get just as many workspaces on the external monitor as you do on your main monitor and they move in tandem or lockstep as you navigate through your dynamic workspaces. You can also obviously drag windows back and forth between workspaces. (I ...

This is really  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=847479 and the bugzilla really says it all. Something broke for certain laptops around the time of Kernel 3.5.0-2.fc17.x86_64 in that laptop suspend works just fine but on resume the screen turns a lovely shade of gray and if you manage to get a TTY you are treated to a litany of messages like Aug 15 01:58:44 tp kernel: [13984.546007] [drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: PFIFO: channel 4 unload timeout Aug 15 01:58:55 tp kernel: [13995.124015] [drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: Failed to idle channel 2. Aug 15 01:58:55 tp kernel: [13995.125006] [drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: PFIFO: channel 2 unload timeout Aug 15 01:59:00 tp kernel: [14000.130020] [drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: Failed to idle channel 3. Again, as stated in the bugzilla, downgrading to an earlier kernel solves the problem. The bugzilla says that 3.4.6-2 (and presumably earlier) works fine, but when I used yum to look for earlier kernels, it was able to find 3.3.4-5.f...