Hellgate London: Exodus, Book 1

Just finished reading Hellgate London: Exodus and was hooked from the beginning. Never been much of a fan of books based on games I haven't played, but I really enjoyed this one and I'm about to start on book 2 Hellgate London: Goetia.

The story takes place in the year 2038 when a rift opens between earth and the Demon world (Hellgates) over the city of London. Through these Hellgates demons start pouring out overtaking the city and turning London into a living nightmare.

The following description is taken from Amazon.com

The once-great city lies in ruins. A massive gash in the fabric of our reality roils against the horizon as it blends into a permanently darkened sky. The world as we know it has come to an end. Demons, the visions of our nightmares, walk the Earth. Mankind, driven in retreat to the sanctuary of the Underground, struggles to survive the Hellish apocalypse.

Among the survivors are those who foresaw the coming of the darkness, those who see it as an opportunity to improve the standing of man, and those who seek revenge for what was lost. All are now banding together in the shadows, arming themselves with futuristic weapons and arcane spells designed for one purpose -- to battle the demonic hordes and take back their world.

About the Author

Mel Odom has written over sixty books which include the novelisation of the movie BLADE and original novels for both the Buffy and Angel series. He has written fantasy, game related fiction, science fiction, movie novelisations, horror, young adult, juvenile, computer strategy guides, action-adventure and comics.

Morning Drive Playlist

Here is today playlist on my drive to work

• The Agonist – Rise and Fall


• Arch Enemy – We Will Rise


• Jack Off Jill – Swollen


• Velcra – Memory Loss


• Flyleaf – Fully Alive


• Diablo Swing Orchestra – Pink Noise Waltz


• Queen Adreena – Medicine Jar

Boot Camp under VMWare Fusion

After playing around with Windows 7 under Boot Camp on my iMac I decided to give VMWare Fusion a try. I launched VMWare Fusion and was surprised that it had my Boot Camp partition listed in my Virtual Machine list. It went through a configuration stage which lasted about a minute and began to boot the virtual machine, boot time was much faster than running a traditional Virtual Machine and once I logged in it automatically started to load the VMWare Tools software.

Now I have the option to run my Boot Camp installation either by booting directly into the Windows 7 partition or run it as a Virtual Machine with VMWare Fusion. This gives me a lot of flexibility since I won't need to restart and switch from OSX to Windows 7, I can now run them both at the same time. Unity (an option under VMWare Fusion) allows me to remove the desktop window and run any of the applications under Windows 7 as if they were installed on my OSX system.

More info on:

• Windows 7


• Boot Camp


• VMWare Fusion

Windows 7 on my iMac

I’m exited about writing this post using “Windows Live Writer” which means that I’ve been able to get Windows 7 running under Boot Camp on my iMac. I still much prefer using OSX than Windows, but this will allow me to code windows specific software on my iMac.

The speed is amazing even though my iMac is two years old, it’s even snappier than my brand new Dell at work (Optiplex 960). Apple has done a great job on getting Windows running on their hardware (I think it run better on Apple hardware then hardware meant for Microsoft products). Anyway, all of my drivers have been detected with no issues what so ever.

Next, I will try to get the Boot Camp/Windows 7 partition loaded into a VMWare Fusion Virtual Machine. From what I’ve heard it runs pretty well since it’s using a partition instead of an image file.

One nice feature is being able to access all of my HFS disks directly from windows (read/write). I’ve had a few bad experiences in the past using my HFS drives on Windows boxes.

I will post any updates if I encounter any issues.

More info on:

• Windows 7


• Windows Live Writer


• Boot Camp


• Dell Optiplex 960


• VMWare Fusion


• Hierarchical File System (HFS)

My Desktop Got Egg'd

A while back I decided to try kde on my ubuntu installation and installed the kubuntu-desktop package using synaptic, all went well until my desktop was egg’d. It wasn’t realy egg’d, but I started getting messages similar to this one "** (process:4337): CRITICAL **: egg_desktop_entries_add_group: assertion 'egg_desktop_entries_lookup_group (entries, group_name) == NULL' failed" all over the place during the install and afterwards when I tried installing any other applications.

My first step when troubleshooting a problem is to Google the error message and I usually get a fix to my problems, but not this time… I only picked up a few bug reports here and there. It took me a day or two to figure out, so here’s how I got my desktop cleaned up…

The problem is caused by duplicate entries in your .desktop files located in /usr/share/applications. First we need to find the culprit, execute the following commands:

cd /usr/share/applications
sudo update-desktop-database -v

You should get output similar to this

Search path is now: [/usr/local/share/applications, /usr/share/applications]
Could not create cache file in directory '/usr/local/share/applications':
Error opening directory '/usr/local/share/applications': No such file or directory
File '/usr/share/applications/kde/mountconfig.desktop' lacks MimeType key
** (process:27561): CRITICAL **: egg_desktop_entries_add_group: assertion egg_desktop_entries_lookup_group (entries, group_name) == NULL' failed
File '/usr/share/applications/kde/kcm_knemo.desktop' lacks MimeType key
File '/usr/share/applications/kde/kcm_btpaired.desktop' lacks MimeType key

Ignore the MimeType errors and focus on the line after the egg_desktop error in this case it’s /usr/share/applications/kde/kcm_knemo.desktop, use your prefered editor (vim in my case) and edit using sudo.

Your file should like something like this (I modified mine to recreate the error to get the correct output)

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=Application
Exec=kcmshell kcm_knemo
Icon=knemo

X-KDE-ModuleType=Library
X-KDE-Library=knemo
X-KDE-FactoryName=knemo
X-KDE-ParentApp=kcontrol

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Network Monitor
Comment=Monitor network interfaces
Categories=Qt;KDE;X-KDE-settings-network

In my case I have ”[Desktop Entry]” and ”Encoding=UFT-8” duplicated. Just remove the duplicate lines, save the file and repeat for all files. Once your done run sudo update-desktop-database -v and your desktop will be clear of eggs.

I also encounterd another error (Not MimeType) but it complained about invalid characters or something. I you have a similar error edit the file and remove the localizations which you do not require. In my case is was a comment for localization “de”.

Hope this helps, I’ll try to clean up the post when I get some free time.

Don’t forget to leave me a comment good or bad, I really appreciate any fixes, improvements you might recommned.

[posted with ecto]

Setting up Freemind in Ubuntu Dapper

IMPORTANT
This tutorial is very old, and it has been brought to my attention that it actually is causing more problems than fixing them. I had written this up before there were any other resources of getting Freemind installed on Ubuntu. Anyway you should head on over to http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/FreeMind_on_Linux to get help on installing FreeMind. Thanks Eric

The Rest of the article will remain intact for posterity.

--------------

Freemind, it's an cross platform java Mind-Mapping application. You might be asking yourself what is a mind mapping application. Here's an quote from the Freemind website:

So you want to write a completely new metaphysics? Why don't you use FreeMind? You have a tool at hand that remarkably resembles the tray slips of Robert Pirsig, described in his sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance called Lila. Do you want to refactor your essays in a similar way you would refactor software? Or do you want to keep personal knowledge base, which is easy to manage? Why don't you try FreeMind? Do you want to prioritize, know where you are, where you've been and where you are heading, as Stephen Covey would advise you? Have you tried FreeMind to keep track of all the things that are needed for that?

Now for the new and improved FreeMind installation instructions: We need to make sure we have the universe and multiverse turned on /etc/apt/sources.list for the archive repository

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper main
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper universe
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper multiverse

The FreeMind files are located here

• Download the main packages
• freemind_0.8.0-1_all.deb
• libforms-java_1.0.5-2_all.deb

To install the plugins downlaod these

• freemind-plugins-help_0.8.0-1_all.deb
• freemind-plugins-svg_0.8.0-1_all.deb
• freemind-plugins-time_0.8.0-1_all.deb

Note: the versions numbers might change, or if the page is not available go to the FreeMind site and click on the Debian for Linux link under downloads.

To install FreeMind (we'll get to the plugins a little later) we need to take care of some dependency problems. Install libcommons-lang-java with you favorite package manager. I prefer to use wajig so this is what I will use during the examples. But, if you prefer apt-get replace "wajig" with "sudo apt-get".

wajig install libcommons-lang-java

Now that libcommons-lang-java is installed we can go ahead and install librelaxng-datatype-java

wajig install librelaxng-datatype-java

Next we install libforms-java from the deb package we downloaded

sudo dpkg -i libforms-java_1.0.5-2_all.deb

We now should have all of dependencies we can go ahead and install FreeMind

sudo dpkg -i freemind_0.8.0-1_all.deb

You should now have a working version of FreeMind on you machine. You can test it out by running the following command

/usr/share/freemind/freemind.sh

If all looks good we can continue to install the plug-ins. The plug-ins also have some dependencies which need to be met. Fist lets take care of the dependencies. All but one are located within the repositories. Install the following packages for the SVG plug-in

wajig install rhino libbsf-java

Install the following packages for the time plugin

wajig install j2re1.4 libjcalendar-java

We need to install libbatik-java and I was able to find a deb package here. Download from one of the mirrors and install using dpkg

sudo dpkg -i libbatik-java_1.5.1-1_all.deb

That should take care of our dependency problem, now lets install our plugins

sudo dpkg -i freemind-plugins-help_0.8.0-1_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i freemind-plugins-svg_0.8.0-1_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i freemind-plugins-time_0.8.0-1_all.deb

Now we just need to take care of our associations Create a file called freemind.xml within /usr/share/mime/packages and add the following text

<mime-info>
<mime-type type="application/x-freemind">
  <comment xml:lang="en">FreeMind Mindmap</comment>
  <glob pattern="*.mm" />
</mime-type>
</mime-info>

Now its time to update the system, enter the following commands

sudo /usr/bin/update-mime-database /usr/share/mime
sudo /usr/bin/update-menus

That should do it. If you check your menu Applications>Office you should see FreeMind and you will also have .mm files associated with FreeMind.

Troubleshooting

Freeming won't start
If you have problems with freemind loading you might want to try this workaround recommended by eiraku in the comments: Edit the startup script to point to the JVM... taken from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FreeMindInBreezy. Update the start script so FreeMind uses Sun Java. There's probably a more elegant way to make this change, and find the Sun Java path, but this works and I've already spent too much time resolving and documenting this.

sudo vi /usr/share/freemind/freemind.sh

Locate the method findjava() and add the line JAVACMD=/usr/lib/j2re1.5-sun/bin/java as shown below. The path could differ slightly if using a different version of Java.

     elif [ -x /usr/bin/java ]
then
_debug "Using /usr/bin/java to find java virtual machine."
JAVACMD=/usr/bin/java
fi
fi
JAVACMD=/usr/lib/j2re1.5-sun/bin/java
# if we were successful, we return 0 else we complain and return 1
if [ -n "${JAVACMD}" ] && [ -x "${JAVACMD}" ]
then
_debug "Using '$JAVACMD' as java virtual machine..."

Exception in thread “main” java.awt.AWTError
If you an error similar to this

Exception in thread “main” java.awt.AWTError: Cannot load AWT toolkit: gnu.java.awt.peer.gtk.GtkToolkit
at java.awt.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit(libgcj.so.7)
at java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment(libgcj.so.7)
at java.awt.Window.(libgcj.so.7)
at java.awt.Frame.(libgcj.so.7)
at javax.swing.JFrame.(libgcj.so.7)
at freemind.main.FreeMind.(FreeMind.java:93)
at freemind.main.FreeMind.main(FreeMind.java:647)
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: gnu.java.awt.peer.gtk.GtkToolkit
at java.lang.Class.forName(libgcj.so.7)
at java.lang.Class.forName(libgcj.so.7)
at java.awt.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit(libgcj.so.7)
…6 more

then you should be able to fix this if you type

sudo update-alternatives --config java

and select

/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun/jre/bin/java

you can also use "Galternatives" which is a GUI that does the same as "update-alternatives". Remember to run it as "sudo" or in this case "gksudo" since it's a GUI application. If you need to install it just type

sudo apt-get install galternatives

and after the installation is complete use the following command

gksudo galternatives

Updates

• 2006/06/01
• Thanks to *armin* I was able to fix a problem with the deb _source.list_ entries. I've also included the packages for each of the two repositories mentioned in the article.
• 2006/06/20
• After reading *432sd's* comment I tried the install from scratch without using the the experimental or unstable repositories from Debian and got it working. So, I've rewritten the article in hopes of making the install cleaner and simpler.
• 2006/06/29
• Fixed a typo in the code for the freemind.xml file setup thanks to feedback *Samuel Hilderbrandt*.
• 2006/08/24
• Added code changes recommended by eiraku at end of article. Thanks for the info *eiraku*.
• 2006/11/27
• Added comments by *Spiro* in the Troubleshooting section. Thanks for the tip.
• 2007/1/24
• Fixed typo in freemind.xml text
  

Resources

• FreeMind on Linux. FreeMind - Free Mind Mapping Software. 05 May 2006.
• Rohr, Johannes. "DA Bug Report Logs - #296258 Freemind: Integration Into GNOME/KDE." Debian Bug Tracking System. 05 May 2006

[posted with ecto]