Wifi with the Dell e1505

So there I was, running a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala on a nice little Dell laptop when I realized something. The wifi (BCM4311 chip) was not being found. First I checked the network settings, and tried to add a network manually and looked for toggles for the wifi as I saw the light was not on and the Bluetooth was. A quick google search lead me indirectly to This Site which stated the files needed to get it all working dandy. Strangely, the files he mentioned didn't exist on the hard drive install, so I ventured over to Synaptic, and lo, there were the three files.

1. /pool/main/p/patch/patch_2.5.9-5_i386.deb
2. /pool/main/d/dkms/dkms_2.1.0.1-0ubuntu1_all.deb
3. /pool/restricted/b/bcmwl/bcmwl-kernel-source_5.10.91.9+bdcom-0ubuntu4_i386.deb

I found each in synaptic, with only the last installed under a slightly different name, but the same version and type. I then installed the other two dependencies, and let her fly. Rebooted, went to System, Administration, Hardware Drivers, Ta-da! Just have to activate and it is good to go!

Windows Update Issues

Got an issue with Windows Update Installations? Best bet is a reinstall after a reboot. Updates don't redownload and fail again? Clear the update cache. How?

1. Open Command Prompt by Start -> Run and type "cmd"
2. On the Command Prompt, type "net stop wuauserv". This is done so that you will terminate the windows automatic update service to allow us to delete the cache files
3. Still on the Command Prompt, type "cd /d %windir%" or "cd\windows"
4. Type "rd /s SoftwareDistribution"
5. Thats it, the cache has been purged. Now we need to restart the windows automatic update service again. To do that, type "net start wuauserv"

Not hard, quite simple. What are you doing? Deleting the folder C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\, and making sure that the Update service is stopped. That's it. Good luck.

How to force HTTPS

I used to wonder why anyone would log in to Facebook, Myspace, or any of the other websites with personal information with HTTP. Every time I saw someone do it, I would let them know that with a simple packet sniffer just about anyone could read their messages, user and password, and plenty more that I'm sure that they would rather not show to the world. Sure, maybe that is a long shot to some of you that someone would be sniffing your traffic and even remotely care about what you are sending. Let me make it less of a long shot, from here on, think banking information and identity theft. Closer to home now? Most people either didn't know or didn't care it seemed. Well, after a stint on retyping HTTPS in the address bar every time I went to one of those sites, I realized that it was just simply a pain. Not the worst fate of all if Atlas is in the mix, but still, very agitating. Thus I began my search.After playing with some Firefox add-ons and some unsuccessful attempts at googling for the answer, I stumbled across the solution to my problem. NoScript. Really. I install this add-on every time I install Firefox for someone who won't get too messed up by it. And now I find that it is the response to one of my newest pet peeves. Awesome. Okay, so how do you do this? It's not too bad. Just right click the NoScript icon, go to options, then click on the Advanced tab, and then the HTTPS tab. Type in the websites that you would like to force HTTPS and those that you want to force HTTP. Easy. Done. That is all. Oh, quick note, don't force HTTPS for a site that doesn't have it. According to my in-depth Google search, that could lead to a bad un-ending loop. Just FYI.

Source:http://noscript.net/features

Adventures in MegaVideo bypassing

As of right this minute, I actually have to wait for megavideo to run out of time. Fun. Actually it doesn't really matter if I had to or didn't, I needed to test the two circumvention tecniquies that I found on LifeHacker. Anyways, they posted two links.
Illimitux.net - Remove MegaVideo, Megaupload and Veoh limitation 
 MegaStreaming - MEGAVIDEO Unlimited Web Streaming
The first is a Firefox Addon (that loads the French addon page), which claims to do many types of circumvention including rapidshare and Megavideo, but as of right now, it doesn't work for MegaVideo. On the firefox addon page it received 3 stars, and each person cited on and off functionality of the addon, and at the moment I seem to be experienceing the latter.
Conclusion: Doesn't work well, I'm not going to use it.
Second one, just a link to another streaming site that tries to re-stream the video link. No joy, MegaVideo detected that I was over my limit immediately(as in after 2 seconds as usual) and I was unable to watch.
Conclusion: Didn't work, and I won't ever know if it did, but I'll assume that it doesn't.

Guess I'll just have to wait. 

Netbeans Autosave

Okay, so I am writing a multipart program, which in this case means that it is worthless to compile until the project is almost completely finished. I was working for a few hours, and it has been a relatively chilly morning, around the low 60's to high 50's, so I opted not to give an air pocket between the laptop and my lap. After a few hours of wonderful comfort and warmth, the high-quality fans on the compaq realized they couldn't keep up with the heat, and shut down to prevent hardware failure. And there went about 45 minutes of work right there. Not much to some, but that was an intense 45 min, and I don't have that much time to spare. Solution? Implement autosaving in netbeans. How? Somebody wrote a plugin to do it for me.
http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal/faces/PluginDetailPage.jsp?pluginid=2404 Linked. I'll comment on here if it doesn't work, but I suspect that it will.

Linux Themes

Adventures in theme installing.

Step one- Downloaded GTK+ theme, dragged it into my theme manager, instant change. Violia!

Step two - Trying to install compiz fusion and emerald beryl theme manager. Doesn't exist for debian so I am compiling it from source.

Simple, ./configure, make, make install.

So far to get this simple process to work, I've installed 5 applications, each claiming to need one program, and really wanting the -dev version of it, usually a library.

Oop, got some fun errors on the make command. Non-reproducable error = hardware/os issue. Fun.

make all-recursive

make[1]: Entering directory `/home/joshua/Desktop/emerald/emerald-0.7.6'

Making all in libengine

make[2]: Entering directory `/home/joshua/Desktop/emerald/emerald-0.7.6/libengine'

make[2]: Nothing to be done for `all'.

make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/joshua/Desktop/emerald/emerald-0.7.6/libengine'

Making all in src

make[2]: Entering directory `/home/joshua/Desktop/emerald/emerald-0.7.6/src'

gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -D_REENTRANT -I/usr/include/gtk-2.0 -I/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/include -I/usr/include/atk-1.0 -I/usr/include/cairo -I/usr/include/pango-1.0 -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include/directfb -I/usr/include/libpng12 -I/usr/include/pixman-1 -I/usr/include/libwnck-1.0 -I/usr/include/startup-notification-1.0 -I/usr/include/compiz -I../include -DLOCALEDIR="\"/usr/local/share/locale"\" -DENGINE_DIR=\"/usr/local/lib/emerald/engines\" -g -O2 -D_REENTRANT -I/usr/include/gtk-2.0 -I/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/include -I/usr/include/atk-1.0 -I/usr/include/cairo -I/usr/include/pango-1.0 -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include/directfb -I/usr/include/libpng12 -I/usr/include/pixman-1 -I/usr/include/libwnck-1.0 -I/usr/include/startup-notification-1.0 -I/usr/include/compiz -MT main.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/main.Tpo -c -o main.o main.c

main.c:5652: internal compiler error: Segmentation fault

Please submit a full bug report,

with preprocessed source if appropriate.

See for instructions.

make[2]: *** [main.o] Error 1

make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/joshua/Desktop/emerald/emerald-0.7.6/src'

make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/joshua/Desktop/emerald/emerald-0.7.6'

make: *** [all] Error 2

I don't think I'm going to continue down this path....but we can mark up one score for the computer.

Issues with Netbeans IDE: Part 2

After uninstalling everything on my computer that had the word Java in it, and re-installing the latest Java JRE+SDK, I was able to install Netbeans without a hitch. Sweet victory.

And later, this.


Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\Documents and Settings\%USER%>java -jar "C:\Documents and Settings\%USER%\M
y Documents\NetBeansProjects\Summervale Resort\dist\Summervale_Resort.jar"
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: summervaleresort/java

Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: summervaleresort.java
        at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
        at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(Unknown Source)
Could not find the main class: summervaleresort.java. Program will exit.

And in a newly created package to fix this I got a new error.

C:\Documents and Settings\%USER%>java -jar "C:\Documents and Settings\%USER%\M
y Documents\NetBeansProjects\JavaApplication2\dist\JavaApplication2.jar"
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: main


And yet here is another post. After getting Netbeans up and running, I wrote my programming assignment and hit the same wall I had hit before(last time I used it). I have spent many google searches on this to absolutely no avail, so hopefully this will help someone else. Okay, here was the problem. Every time I tried to run the code after a successful build I hit a
"No main classes found" 
message or the weirder errors when trying to run from command prompt.
In the end, however; I found a thread with someone else with the same issue, and no, he never found it out as far as the forum went. Here was the problem. It seems that some people don't want .java files imported into their .jars for some reason, so the default behavior for Netbeans IDE 6.7.1 in all of its wisdom is to ignore both .java and .form files. So, if you happen to write your main code in a .java file, the program will never load it, and therefore no main class will exist.
SOLUTION:

Right click the package and click properties
Expand the build option and click on packaging.
There is a line that says "Exclude from Jar file" with a textbox beside it.
Clear it. Tada! Done.
If that isn't it/you aren't using .java files, make sure that in the run option (in the same area as the build option) that your class is indeed the main class listed there.
That's all for now. Hope that helped.