For now, cuadradouno.com.ar is dead.

For example, I have set a partition under a folder in Ubuntu, so the torrent destination path in Wine is Z:\partition\Torrents

In Windows, I can only point a drive letter to a folder, but not the other way around!

I wondered if Windows had anything similar to symbolic links. I figured I could point a drive letter to a folder, then put a symbolic link to the folder, to simulate the path in Wine.

Apparently, it’s not well-known, but there are symbolic links in Windows. They’re not documented, and you need to buy a Microsoft software kit, which includes special tool to create them. They’re also called something else: junction points.

Fortunately, there’s a freeware GUI program that can do this for you: Junction Link Magic. It’s a very small download!

Create a virtual drive

subst Z: C:\vdrive

The vdrive folder is a placeholder, we’ll never actually see vdrive. Create a folder called partition inside Z: (C:\vdrive\partition).

Use Junction Link Magic

Create a link from Z:\partition to the actual partition drive.

When you browse Z:\partition, you should see your Torrents folder.

Now, you can safely run uTorrent from the USB stick, and it won’t notice a thing!

Yep, it’s THAT simple. Here are the locations of the hosts file on different systems.

All you need to do is add an entry:

127.0.0.1      www.myfbappwebsite.com

This should only be used for the very first stages of your site development, as it doesn’t allow any other users. It also might not be team-friendly. In that case, you can use a dynamic DNS service and use a temporary URL in the App’s settings.

Note: It’s possible that if you’re behind a router and you use a dynamic DNS service, *you* will be shown your router’s control panel. Confirm this with a trusted friend before giving away the temporary URL. Once you’re sure only you can see your router’s control panel, correct this issue locally by using the hosts file solution above.

I made a small shell script to delete and create a link to my localhost htdocs directory. That way, I never have to move my projects around, I just keep them in separate directories under one main directory.

The problem comes when I forget important things: such as directory names. Instead of just typing ls /projects, I want the script to tell me the options I have.

And so, this little code is born, by not giving the script any arguments:

#!/bin/bash
	if [ -z $1 ]
	then
		echo "No valid user was provided!"
		echo "Possible users:"
		declare -a FOO
		let count=0
		let count2=0
		for d in $( find /projects -maxdepth 1 -type d -printf "%f " ); do
			if [ $count2 -gt 0 ]
			then
				FOO[$count]=$d
			fi
			((count++))
			((count2++))
		done
		echo ${FOO[@]}
	fi

Note: I did it this way because otherwise you get “projects” in the list of results.

Since it was not something important to me, it took me a while to start searching for a solution.

The problem is not a bug, it’s a change made to gconf.

Fortunately, someone was able to find a workaround to those changes. It only involves creating a shell script, setting it to start every time you log in (it will create a file called .Xdbus in your home path), and then you modify your crontable so that the .Xdbus file is called before your script.

Once you log back in, you should see the wallpaper being changed again! :D

Let’s see the versions:

Wine (development version): 1.1.10
VisualBoyAdvance: 1.8.0-beta3

Install Wine

If you don’t have the latest version of Wine, follow the instructions to add the repositories in your Debian-based distro.

Once you have everything, move the VBA executable to a convenient location. We must first locate any errors, so don’t use your saved games and don’t prepare for serious gaming yet!

Fixing Errors

Open the Terminal and type:

wine /path/to/VBA.exe

We should get a bunch of things. If VBA appears, don’t celebrate yet! Click on the menues, and configure it to your needs. Do settings stick? Does the program shut off? Choose “Open GameBoy” under the File menu.

If VBA dies after you try to call a “dialog” (open/save/folder list), you might need to get some DLL files. Check the output in the Terminal.

In my case, I needed MFC42.DLL. But, make sure you get the latest version of the DLL! For example, a DLL from 1997 will still throw errors (and this was downloaded from a famous DLL provider website.) If you have a copy of Windows XP with the latest updates, get the file from it.

Once you copied that DLL file to /home/user/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32 (path may be different for you), run VBA again, like before.

Testing Games

Try loading a game. If the file dialog doesn’t kill VBA, you’ve fixed this particular problem!

Now, make sure you keep backup copies of your save files, put the copies in the directories you chose (Options > Emulator > Directories…). Make sure the files and directories are writable.

If you start anew (with no save files), you could run into a problem where you can’t save the game in-game, no matter what you do. Only through VBA’s “save states” (in some games like Pokemon, this is useless.)

Using Cheats

Lastly, the cheats system should work with no problems. I haven’t done a complete test, but with one cheat enabled I had no problems. I imported the cheat list from a Windows-made file, and this made no difference with the performance of the cheats.

In other words, a command that accepts parameters, switches, and does interesting things in a language we all love and understand.

First of all, we’ll try phpLipsum, my newest CLI script. I wanted to have a way to access lipsum.com without any fancy GUI, just a quick command.

At YubNub.org they have online commands (very useful!), this command was the one I needed on my computer.

Handling the switches should be easy enough. We’ve seen this before, in previous articles. ;-)

$data = @file_get_contents($url) or die("\nError: Could not download the data.\n\n");
$xml = simplexml_load_string($data);

Once we have our URL built, we can make SimpleXML parse the XML for us. The text will be available through $xml->lipsum.

echo $xml->lipsum;

To make it a little bit easier on the eye I did this:

echo "\n    ".wordwrap(str_replace(".\n", ".\n    ", $xml->lipsum), 80)."\n\n";

This way, the text will be formatted nicely on the CLI. And the spaces shouldn’t affect its appearance on HTML!

Once our script is done, we make it executable. Remember how?

chmod +x lipsum.php

But I wanted to use it like this:

lipsum -a 2

So, we move it to /usr/bin/

sudo cp lipsum.php /usr/bin/lipsum

Note: You can move it (mv) or copy it (cp). I chose to copy it, so that I can keep a backup.

Now, we can finally have our own “command”! It’s quite easy and practical, and we haven’t abandoned our dear PHP. <3

Download phpLipsum

IMPORTANT: This is still in testing mode. Should you try this, make sure the download is not important. If you have a monthly limit of downloads or a low bandwidth, wait and see until I have done more tests! I’ll try to keep this post updated.

You probably have heard of the famous “cron jobs” – be them from your web hosting service or your own Linux computer. In fact, I’ve covered how to use them both in Ubuntu and in Windows XP, with PHP scripts. A cron job lets you execute a command at a desired time. However, there is also incron, which stands for inotify cron. incron monitors your file system for changes, and executes a command on a specific action. Say, for example, every time a file is deleted, a script is called to log the affected file’s name and its deletion time.

Here is a mirror for the Gzip archive with all the Deb packages needed to install OpenOffice.org 3.0. It’s for Debian-based Linux distros, so if you have Ubuntu or Debian, this is what you need.

Note: I would recommend uninstalling the OOo version that comes with Ubuntu, as it might conflict with the new version.

OOo 3.0 asked me if I wanted to start afresh or import settings from OOo 2.x… So maybe you can keep the old version, import the settings by running OOo 3.0 once, then uninstalling OOo 2.x.

Important: If you’re new or not in a rush, you could wait until it’s available in the Ubuntu repositories.

Once you extract the contents of the archive, open the Terminal in the directory where all the Deb packages are, and run the following command:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Enjoy!