The tool which can help fix this is xrandr.

First, query X11 to find out what monitors there are:

$ xrandr -q

Once the monitor IDs are known, this fixes things for me:

$ xrandr --output VGA1 --auto --right-of LVDS1

Where LVDS1 is the laptop’s screen and VGA1 is the second screen.

Happy hackin’!

Anyway, the upgrade from Fedora 15 to 16 went smoothly (although a bit slow, thanks to my shitty internet connection), using the PreUpgrade script/process. I was a bit sceptical about doing an upgrade and not a cleanstall, but gave it a shot after all (note: every time I tried a dist-upgrade with Ubuntu it failed miserably). PreUpgrade was downloading stuff for a bunch of hours and (about) an hour of installing them, the upgrade was… Done. Fedora 16 just booted up and I was using my laptop just as before.

I did the post upgrade steps from the above linked article, but the yum distro-sync step failed; it was complaining something about a “Transaction Check Error” for a libdvdcss package. I simply disabled the rpm.livna.org software source, re-run the distro-sync, it did it’s thing and then re-enabled the source.

The second thing that “wasn’t working” is that Apache and MySQL were not starting on bootup, so I ran chkconfig for both of ‘em:

$ chkconfig --levels 235 mysqld on
$ chkconfig --levels 235 httpd on

Lastly, grub was upgraded to grub2. It was working fine, just that it was showing the grub menu on startup, which is a bit silly given that I’m running only one OS on this machine. Anyway, added the following lines to /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY=true
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=0 # I actually edited this line, from 5 to 0

and ran:

$ grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

I also thought for a while that there was an issue with my wifi, that it’s dropping connection randomly, but it only happened once, so I don’t know what to do with it.

Happy hackin’!

The solution is pretty easy actually: instead of setting breakpoints with Netbeans, use xdebug_break() where you want the break to happen and it will happily be caught by the IDE. After the break happened use the “Step into” (F7) functionality to see what’s going on.

First, stop jenkins:

robert@odin:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/jenkins stop

Create the new home directory and move existing stuff from the old home to the new one:

robert@odin:~$ sudo usermod -m -d /home/jenkins jenkins

Now, I didn’t manage to set the ENV JENKINS_HOME to the new home, it was always using the old one, so I edited the init.d script:

robert@odin:~$ sudo vi /etc/init.d/jenkins

and in the “DAEMON_ARGS=…” line change JENKINS_HOME env to --env=JENKINS_HOME=/home/jenkins. In the end the whole line reads something like:

DAEMON_ARGS="--name=$NAME --inherit --env=JENKINS_HOME=/home/jenkins --output=$JENKINS_LOG --pidfile=$PIDFILE"

Update on September 20th: Vranac blogged about how to change the JENKINS_HOME properly

Start jenkins

robert@odin:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/jenkins start

and go to http://server:port/configure and verify that jenkins works as before and is using the new home.

Happy hackin’!

Greatest help to figure out this was Raphael Dohms’ blog post “Debugging PHPUnit tests in Netbeans with Xdebug”. Almost worked out fine, but Netbeans complained about a missing index file and the autoload of files was… not really working. After a bit of poking around, the solution was to go to File -> Project Properties -> Run Configuration and set the “Index File” to /path/to/zend_framework_2/tests/_autoload.php – no more missing index file and the autoload works too!

Starting the debug session stays the same as explained in Raphael’s post: click “Debug project” (CTRL+F5), go to the terminal and just type something like:

robert@odin:~/www/zf2/tests$ /path/to/phpunit-debug Zend/Dojo/DojoTest.php

Netbeans will pick up the connection and debugging can start!

Happy hackin’!

sudo apt-get install php-pear php5-dev
sudo pecl install apc

but the pecl install apc died with a bunch of “/tmp/pear/temp/APC/apc.c:430: error: ‘apc_regex’ has no member named ‘preg’” and similar messages. Luckily, I can use google which led me to this serverfault answer: I was missing the “libpcre3-dev” package. After doing a quick sudo apt-get install libcpre3-dev APC got installed correctly.

I’ve installed it from the CD image. The installation process was straightforward, altho either the boot loader or freebsd was getting confused in the first few attempts because I was installing it on the slave HDD. After installing it on the master, everything went fine.

On this machine I’m using a LevelOne WNC0305 USB wireless card which uses realtek’s dreaded RTL8187 chipset. After a bit of a googling, I ended up on the freebsd 8.2 hardware notes page, which in the wireless section lists all the available wireless drivers. From there I figured I need to use the urtw driver, that is to add:

if_urtw_load="YES"

to the /boot/loader.conf file. After rebooting the machine, it recognised my wireless card as urtw0. Hooray! Now to connect to the wireless router and onto the world.

For that, this message about (not) getting the ifconfig scan results helped me out, this bit to be precise:

# ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev urtw0
# ifconfig wlan0 up list scan

and it listed my router correctly. To make it stay that way after rebooting, I’ve added this to the /etc/rc.conf file (I might note that it was empty before this):

wlans_urtw0="wlan0"

At this time I figured I just could ssh to one of the servers in the office (we run freebsds there) and “steal” rest of the configuration, so I ended up with a /etc/rc.conf file something like this:

hostname="freebsd_box"
wlans_urtw0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="inet 192.168.0.100 netmask 255.255.255.0"
defaultrouter="192.168.0.1"

Reboot once again and I can ping anything via IP, but not via hostnames. Again, this (ooold) message about DNS settings in freebsd showed me the right direction – /etc/resolv.conf:

nameserver ip.of.name.server1
nameserver ip.of.name.server2

Reboot and everything is working fine! Victory!

Next step was (is) to fetch/update the ports database:

# csup -L 2 -h cvsup.freebsd.org /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile

From here I believe it’s all about installing software from the ports which should be all fine.

Happy hackin’!

Task filters

Setting rules for the filter

To be honest, I wasn’t even using it (until now), cause, by default it shows all the todo-s and issues from all the files from the current project. This can produce a pretty big list if (like me) you have Zend Framework, Pear and other frameworks and libraries set on the include path for the project you’re working in, as the little @todo-s will show up from those files, too.

Filters to the rescue. On the “Tasks” window there’s that little icon of that whatever-it’s-called showed on the first image, where you can create and edit filters. I’ve created a simple one, which excludes todo-s from files that have “Zend” in their location and includes only from PHP files (second image).

Me likes this feature.

Note: the following text is not about bashing other developers and their works, but to highlight the importance of proper input filtering. I myself have failed on this, several times.

OMG! I'm 1023 years old!

OK, let’s take this one step further. On a site where the user can register an account and afterwards can edit his or hers profile. I register, go to the user panel, the usual stuff – change email, password, location, DoB (Date of Birth)… A quick inspection of the source – a hidden field “id” with a number in it. Hmm… Quickly, I register another account, note the “id” on that second account, go back to the first account, change the “id” of the first account to the “id” of the second account, change the DoB (just to see any actual information changing), click submit… “Your profile has been updated successfully.” Mine? Not really, the DoB is like it was in the first place… Go to the second account… Oh boy. I successfully changed the DoB of the second account, with my first account. Now, I haven’t seen their source code, but I can imagine what was going on. Something like this:

$id = (int)$_POST['id'];
$dob = $_POST['dob'];

$sql = "UPDATE users SET dob = '" . $dob . "' WHERE id = " . $id;

On the positive side, when I entered letters in that hidden field, I was told by the app that I haven’t filled all the fields correctly, which means they filtered even the hidden field, but skipped to check if that “id” is actually me.

OK, I know, the title is “Bad Firebug!” and the problems are actually about filtering user input, but I needed a catchy title to have your attention on Twitter :P

Even tho a field seems “unchangeable”, with a help of an awesome little app, it becomes changeable. And dangerous.

Filter input, escape output :)

P.S.: On the image above you can see my profile on a bulletin board, where I changed my year of birth from 1986 to 986 with Firebug. The years are in a select box; the lowest value is 1910. You can see my actual profile here.

Moblin is an open source project focused on building a Linux-based platform optimized for the next generation of mobile devices including Netbooks, Mobile Internet Devices, and In-vehicle infotainment systems.

Cause I don’t own (yet!) a netbook, I installed it under VirtualBox (VB from now on). The image is 666 MB big and it comes not in an .iso, but in a .img format. But, VB, a really awesome software, had no troubles booting from it. As with the majority of Linux distros nowadays, Moblin image is also a Live CD, which means you can run it, without installing it.

Installing Moblin

The preinstall process is made up from 6-7 steps: choosing the language, the keyboard layout, the timezone and, of course, the partitioning. Basically, it’s just another boring “Next-Next” process. The installation itself took around 6 minutes to finish. When it’s done, it asks for a username and a password.

The first boot went pretty quickly, considering that booting under VB takes longer than booting under regular installations. The thing about VB is that it needs, the so called “Guest Additions” installed on the guest machine, so that the guest machine can be used normally. In this case, I failed to install it: Moblin comes with one version of the Linux kernel and the additions are for another version of the kernel. This prevented me in my quest to test Moblin fully. Anyway, I’ve managed to take a few screenshots of it, all are uploaded to my Picasa profile.

The m_zone

There was one thing that was strange. It has a “Status panel”, from which you can update your profiles on social networks. A really useful stuff. I just opened it up and updated my Twitter profile. Almost. I wasn’t logged in to Twitter from it and Moblin didn’t say a word about it. It just happily said that my status is updated. Once I found the “Web services” panel I logged in and this time I was really updating my Twitter stream.

I really was hoping to test it normally and write a detailed review of it, but this guest additions thingy thought otherwise. Moblin is a great distro, even in this beta stage I believe it’s useful. What do you think? Did you test it already, saw it in action?

One thing’s for sure: when I’ll get myself a netbook, it’ll run on Moblin.

Cheers!

P.S.: Check out the Moblin intro, too!