Ever asked yourself where to find files in Ubuntu packages?

Have you ever asked yourself where to find the library ABC - and how to install it convenient using the apt-get install ... command in Ubuntu linux?

Well, I had the issue and almost went crazy trying to install the lib gtksourceview-2.0 ...

Then I found apt-file (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apt-file). A really great tool which solved the issue described above immediately. apt-file search solved the issue in seconds.

A great tool!

Running Titanium from Appcelerator behind Proxy ...

The Titanium X-mobile development framework looks nice - but is a bit goatish when it should run on a connected Ubuntu 9.10 - BEHIND a proxy.

I downloaded the latest (1.1 at this time) version, unzipped it and started it by clicking on the executable. This lead to a short installation first time and a login screen. Having created a login on the web site already, I tried to login immediately.
But the application said it couldn't connect to the internet to login.

On a plain internet connection everything went smoothly.

Browsing the web indicated that setting the http_proxy environment variable might help.
Setting the variable on the bash with "export http_proxy=:" helped. Starting the Titanium Developer Kit from this bash allowed me to login.

Interestingly, this is not really documented. Perhaps this post saves you some time ;)

-- Michael.

Setting proxies for ANT and IVY

In a bash based environment simply type:

export ANT_OPTS="-Dhttp.proxyHost=set_your_proxy_here -Dhttp.proxyPort=set_your_port_here"

Eclipse and Proxies ...

Edit eclipse.ini and append:

-Dorg.eclipse.ecf.provider.filetransfer.excludeContributors=org.eclipse.ecf.provider.filetransfer.httpclient
-Dhttp.proxyPort=1234
-Dhttp.proxyHost=yourproxygoeshere
-Dhttp.nonProxyHosts=localhost|127.0.0.1

Liferay 5.2.3 ... Compiling EXT and good-to-knows ...

Currently, I'm having some looks at Liferay 5.2.3 and how stable, function-rich of an environment it is. Might be a good technology candidate for our portal site? Well, let's see.

I'm reading the book "Liferay Portal 5.2 Systems Developmen" by Jonas X. Yuan (Packt Publishing). Part of the book is to setup the development environment EXT and the SDK portion of Liferay. The author actually proposes to download the latest versions of EXT and SDK from the trunk. I had happy 2 hours downloading and re-doing the compilation and development process. Actually, it turned out that the trunk version of the author DID obviously compile - mine didn't ...

So, what I did is to download the latest release version 5.2.3. Building the liferay 5.2.3 portal worked fine - but ext failed ... But it was a quite simple "bug". Costed again 1 hour of searching, but well ...

In the file ext/build-common.xml locate the entry:


<path id="project.classpath">
   <pathelement path="${classpath}" />
   <path refid="lib.classpath" />
</path>


and add the highlighted elements below:



<path id="project.classpath">
   <pathelement path="${classpath}" />
   <fileset dir="${project.dir}/modules" includes="*.jar" />
   <fileset dir="${project.dir}/ext-service" includes="*.jar" />
   <path refid="lib.classpath" />
</path>


Without the above mentioned additions ext won't compile on my system.

As soon as you're ready to go, you need to take care about you XML-files and especially how you wrap values and the surrounding XML tags. The file ext/ext-web/docroot/WEB-INF/portlet-ext.xml is needed to configure your portlets developed during the course of the book. Be sure you write classes without tabs or spaces:

Not like this:

<resource-bundle>
  com.liferay.portlet.StrutsResourceBundle
</resource-bundle>


but like this:

<resource-bundle>com.liferay.portlet.StrutsResourceBundle</resource-bundle>

Otherwise you'll get nasty error messages leading to some quite frustrating experiences ...

I'll keep you posted!

Running PhoneGap on HTC Hero

PhoneGap has quite a promise - do applications which are cross-mobile-platforms! How? Utilizing JavaScript glued together with native libs. For further information, have a look at the PhoneGap site.

I was seriously curious if that promise can be hold. I wanted to test PhoneGap on my Android 1.5 HTC Hero phone. First, it took me quite some attempts to identify the right version of PhoneGap, get the development environment up and play around. Initially, I wasn't successful at all.

I setup the environment as described here: Getting started with Android PhoneGap in Eclipse. Then I downloaded PhoneGap 0.8.2. Unpacked and imported it into Eclipse and did some modifications (since HTC Hero runs Android 1.5 ...).

What I did?

1) Open the project settings for PhoneGap (Alt+Enter). Navigate to "Android" (if it's not there your dev environment is most likely not properly setup ...). Select "Android 1.5".

2) Open PhoneGap's Manifest "AndroidManifest.xml". Here, locate the section:

<supports-screens
android:largeScreens="true"
android:normalScreens="true"
android:smallScreens="true"
android:resizeable="true"
android:anyDensity="true"
/>

and delete it.

3) In the same file, locate:


<uses-sdk minsdkversion="4">


and modify it to


<uses-sdk minsdkversion="3">

4) Deploy it onto the device!

Amazing!

OpenSSO loops infinite after showing login screen

Interesting problem ...

I just integrated JBoss 5.1.0 with OpenSSO Express Build 7 (Apr 2009) via the Agent sitting in the application server. On Glassfish, everything went smooth and fine - without any issues. Now, running the very same example (see the Lab 6727 of JavaOne 2009) named "mini-agentsample" on JBoss - it leads to the login page, does the authentication and then results in FireFox (3.5.5 - on Ubuntu 9.10) saying:


The page isn't redirecting properly

Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.

* This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept
cookies.

Try Again.


Nice. Looking for a solution took me some time. SUN's wiki talks about "Infinite redirection between OpenSSO server and OpenSSO client" - which actually describes the problem very well - and more importantly solved it!

You need to login to the OpenSSO server admin console and navigate to:
* Configuration
* Servers and Sites
* Default Server Settings
* Advanced

Find "com.iplanet.am.cookie.c66Encode" and set it to "true". For me it worked.