This is probably particular to our configuration, but I think it is a fairly common setup: Jetty on Ubuntu on EC2.

The problem is that Jetty uses SLF4J, and includes the default slf4j-simple.jar which logs everything. In order to fix it, you have to remove the symlink in /usr/share/jetty/lib/jsp2.1 and create a new symlink to slf4j-jdk14.jar (and the configure java logging to not log at INFO).

Step by step:

1. cd /usr/share/jetty/lib/jsp2.1
2. sudo rm slf4j-simple.jar
3. sudo ln -s ../../../java/slf4j-jdk14.jar slf4j-jdk14.jar
4. create /usr/share/jetty/webapps/root/WEB-INF/logging.properties with
   .level=WARNING
5. cd /etc/defaults
6. edit jetty and add:
   JAVA_OPTIONS=-Djava.util.logging.config.file=/usr/share/jetty/webapps/root/WEB-INF/logging.properties

tl;dr version: use FontForge. Open the .otf file and then File->Generate, and select TrueType

Automated/scripted version:
Install the required software:

sudo apt-get install fontforge python-fontforge

Create a tiny python file:

#!/usr/bin/python
import fontforge
font = fontforge.open(“STIXGeneral.otf”)
font.generate(“STIXGeneral.ttf”)

Pretty simple. I wrote a otf2ttf.py script for converting a directory full of fonts all at once.

documentation | script

Parameters:

• -s 0 (capture the complete packet)
• -n (don't try to convert numeric ip/port)
• -w filename.pcap (save to file)
• port nnnn (capture anything going to or from port nnnn)

Use Control-C to stop the capture (it closes the file gracefully).

Use WireShark to open the .pcap file.

First, figure out the table name from a dump of the schema:

mdb-schema database.mdb

Then export it:

mdb-export database.mdb tablename

The NANPA table has spaces in the name, so you have to put double-quotes around it.

cd /usr/local/google_appengine
sudo chmod -R ugoa+r *

I would recommend Google switching from a .zip file to a .tar.gz file (which can have specific permissions in it).

Unfortunately, GAE has some pretty severe limitations in terms of the standard Java classes. I use the iText library, and managed to get it to work in AppEngine, but the missing classes mean custom colors and fonts don’t work. Since the point of LabelMakr was to print nice looking labels, including colors and fonts, I never really used the GAE version. Finally I saw an article comparing VPS hosts and decided to give Linode a try. Well, it has worked out very well. The signup process at Linode was trivial. Ubuntu installation was a breeze and the server is setup exactly the way I want. And the kicker is performance. This is a graph from Google’s Webmaster Tools, showing how long GoogleBot takes to download a page:

Performance on Google AppEngine vs Linode

Install Ubuntu Server, do not select a profile at the end.

Install ssh and mysql. It will ask for a root password.

apt-get install ssh mysql-server

Grant the root user access from across the network

mysql -p
GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'root'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

Tweek the config to listen on the network and to store each table in a separate file. Edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf and in the [mysqld] section, comment out the existing bind-address and add one with the server’s IP address, and add a line innodb_file_per_table

Restart the server daemon

Both the host and the guest are Debian 4.0 (Etch), and the host has multi-core with multiple CPUs.

Switch the guest to look at a different clock source: Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add divider=10 clocksource=acpi_pm to the line that starts with # kopt=.

Run update-grub. This re-does the menu entries to have the new options.

Set the guest to sync to the host’s time using VMWare Tools’ time sync. On the host edit the guest.vmx file and add/change tools.syncTime = "TRUE" and tools.syncTime.period = 60.

Restart the VM. cat the file /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource to make sure it is in fact using acpi_pm.

Side note: it may be better to use NTP to sync the time, but only if you add tinker panic 0 to the top of /etc/ntp.conf. I didn’t find this until after I had the VMWare host time sync working, so I have not tried it.

References: VMWare KB article on Linux settings, VMWare KB article on timekeeping

Anyhow, I found the solution! Edit (or create) ~/.vmware/config and add the line

xkeymap.nokeycodeMap="TRUE"

The error looks like:

java.lang.RuntimeException: Unexpected exception
...
Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/google/appengine/api/users/User


The solution is to add the following lines to the config/user/ant-macros.xml at line 99:

<fileset dir="${appengine.sdk}/lib/impl" includes="**/*.jar">
<fileset dir="${appengine.sdk}/lib/shared" includes="**/*.jar">


I am amazed that this is still in there. My project is so simple and I copied it straight from the new_project_template. I don’t understand why everyone else doesn’t get the same error. Am I the only one using ant?

AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .html

This lets you can still have nice URLs that end with .html, but run then through the PHP processor for includes and such like.

• Firefox (all flavors) passed Internet Explorer (all versions).
• IE7 passed IE6.

I suppose FileFormat.Info is a fairly technical site, so this may not be representative of the internet population as a whole.

I am not doing anything browser-specific so it doesn’t really affect me directly, but it is good to see real competition.

curl -C – –compressed –output disk.iso http://example/download/disk.iso

preunzip *.wl

Then merge into a single list, eliminating duplicates:

sort –unique –ignore-case *.wl >list.txt

In additon, I want everything to be UTF-8:

iconv -f ISO8859-1 -t UTF-8 list.txt >ulist.txt

Pretty simple.  The merged english word list has 137,883 words.

1. Run gconf-editor
2. Open the tree to /apps/gedit-2/preferences/editor/save
3. Edit writable_vfs_schemes
4. Add ftp to the list

Voila. Gedit saving FTP. Via the kaylus on the Ubuntu Forums, but it is the same in Debian Etch.

apt-get install psmisc libxrender1 libxt6

Then it will install, and the VMs can have GUI even though the host doesn’t!

curl –verbose –output bigfile.tar.gz –limit-rate 3000 http://download.example.com/bigfile.tar.gz

Install cups-pdf:

sudo apt-get install cups-pdf

Add a printer. I find that the browser-based configuration works better than the GUI versions (Foomatic-GUI and Gnome CUPS Manager):

• browse to http://localhost:631/
• Add a printer
• Choose the type Generic postscript color printer rev4
• Choose the location cups-pdf:/

The PDF files are put in a PDF subdirectory of your home directory (~/PDF). However, if you print while logged in as root (for example, the test page from the web interface), the PDFs usually end up in /root/PDF but once I found it in /var/spool/cups-pdf/ANONYMOUS.

One other thing to note is that it uses the title of the print job as the file name. The title is set by the program that’s printing, but if it is there is an existing file with the same name, it will overwrite it silently. Generally this isn’t an issue, but Firefox/Iceweasel uses the page <title> as the print job name, so if pages have generic/bad titles, you have to be careful.