Welcome to The Linux Page

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This site is a collection of my own work with Linux. Certain things are easy, others take time to decipher and if I ever need to repeat the work (which usually happens!), then I need to remember everything by memory or... have a site with all the steps taken and to take again.

The following are my most recent posts:

A Schema for engadget Solid State A/V Switch

I am working on an A/V switch with the kids and was annoyed by the fact that the page talking about how to do that did not include anything like a schema (it has some bus drawing... who cares?!) This being said, the concept is perfect and works just fine. It's just hard for me to see that when the person just says connect this here and that there and voilà!

Original A/V switch information:

https://www.engadget.com/2007-03-13-how-to-make-a-solid-state-a-v-switcher.html

The source is a gschem file as created by gEDA Schematic Editor (a free tool you can get on Ubuntu.) Already the free ...

Introduction

Today I was requested by my wife to make her Nook work on our wireless network (she usually can use our neighbors but the connection drops all the time.)

The Nook makes use of DHCP only. So on my static IP address only network, it's kinda not going to work as is! (I must have static IP addresses for security so I can setup a strong firewall.)

So I had to go through a few hoops as follow to get everything to work. Interestingly enough I have not found another website that was talking about such things and their solutions on Linux.

Oh! Wait! Nookers are probably not Linux ...

Distributed compilation with Linux C++

I really want to try that feature! I have been using Incredibuild on MS-Windows and it can make a software compile 5 to 6 times faster. (i.e a software normally compiling in 1h compiles in 10 minutes!)

Under Linux some people worked on the C compiler front end to move the process to other machines as required. This is called distcc (i.e instead of using cc to compile, now you use distcc). This front end has a list of all the C compiler machines and uses them whenever possible.)

From what I can see on the front page, the setup should be a breeze (yeah... I know) and it does not even require ...

I have been wondering about setting up one of my computers for 2 or 3 users with 3 mice, 3 keyboards and 3 monitors.

This apparently may require 3 video boards with Ubuntu. That could be a problem with AGP, but PCI Express may work fine with that. Only problem, in most cases boards only have 2 slots these days...

Anyway, if I ever try to do that, I'll put the info here on how I got it to work... for now, you'll want to look at this page on Ubuntu:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MultiseatX

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiseatTeam/Status

...

As I was working on a table extracted from a PDF file, I wanted to load that table in Excel. By default it would put all the fields in column A. Not good. So I put that in a text file, added a pipe at the end of each time and then join lines really quick (with vim, it's J to join lines.)

Now I had a nice .csv file, with fields separated by a pipe (|) character.

123|Something|More info|This "worked" before?!

Now, time to load that file in Excel. I tried that and it gave me everything cut in "strange" places but especially, no way to select the column separator. Why ...

In the last few days I have been working on a small project to get a really nice form for one of my sites. The form uses a lot of JavaScript for all sorts of fancy things (such as check user input to make sure we don't accept total crap such as an empty entry or just "1" as a credit card number.)

The information finds itself in an IFRAME, which was the easiest way to get the time to load at decent speed and to better manage the form in a separate area and not the main landing page. This will make it easier to maintain the landing page itself.

however, that created ...

Large version of the waiting wheel As I'm working on a new feature for our Snap! Website system I wanted to have a turning wheel that asks users to wait while the computer does work.

The graphic is very simple: a rectangle with a border and a background color that rotates. However, I do not have a tool (that I know of) which could create the graphics automatically. So I did it with quite a bit of manual labor, but it was fun to learn a few things along the way.

I use inkscape to create such graphics. First I created the rectangle on the left. With that I had to have it rotated going 360 degrees repeating the rectangle 24 ...

jQuery and hidden IFRAME bug

In the last 3 days I've been working on a new page and ran in some strange problem. There was an error in the console but things seemed to otherwise work just fine so I ignored it (since it wasn't in my own code...)

That error was an unhandled jQuery error which resulted in "let's stop the JavaScript at once." This meant all the page initialization failed (or did not occur.) The code was there otherwise. What give?!

The script in question was loaded from a hidden IFRAME, something like this:

  <div style="display: none;">
    <iframe ...

Today I worked a bit with jQuery to create an advanced form. Advanced just because it is tabbed and appears in a pop-up, nothing too major really. Maybe later I'll add some tests to validate the data being entered before someone can submit the form...

In any event, I ran in a problem which was to create a set of click callback functions (event handlers) and each of which should make use of a different index. So... I have 4 tabs and each one has a number: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Say I call each one of these numbers #tab1, #tab2, #tab3, and #tab4. Now I want to create a click function on each one ...

Today I wanted to check whether a table existed in a MS-Access database from a macro define in a MS-Access module.

The test opens the specified database (databaseName) and from that object checks wether a table definition exists (name). I wonder whether there would be a better way to go through the list of items and just know whether an item with that name exists or not instead of generating an error (because the underlaying system will anyway search that list of items for the name, although it may be faster this way in visual basic.)

There is the function I wrote (sample usage: if ...

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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