Install chm2pdf, which is in the repositories starting with Ubuntu 8.04

sudo apt-get install chm2pdf

Get help with

chm2pdf –help

Convert with for example:

chm2pdf –continuous –no-links –quiet input_file.chm

The input file should not contain any special characters or spaces, otherwise you might get all kinds of “File not found” errors, regarding for example urlslist.txt and other files. So rename your input file accordingly.

This process is far easier than working extract_chmLib and htmldoc.

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Bilbo Blogger

The search led me to the conclusion that the transitions (slideshow functionality) should be handled by a different script than the actual image display. For the former there is the excellent jQuery Cycle plugin.

So how do we get text displayed over the image?

One solution might be to use a jQuery gallery plugin that can do titles over images. fancybox is such a package. For an impressive mashup of fancybox and cycle you might check out this site and look at the source code, js and css. You just need the two plugins (fancybox and cycle) and then call

$(’#your_element_collection’).cycle();

I found all this a bit thick and heavy for my needs, but certainly useful to keep in mind and add to the toolset. Then there was the recent image title demo by Chris Coyier from css-tricks.com which demonstrates a simple technique to display a text title on top of the image via a custom jQuery plugin, which improves on the common h2 + spans technique. In the comments David Chambers posted a pure-css image title solution, using a an html definition list. This is arguably a more semantic markup than the commonly used h2 tag.

Anyway, I mashed this up with the cycle plugin and created a small demo app which you can check out from github. or watch the demo. This might be a powerful and easy to implement way of getting text overlays over images, and then animating a slide show with the extremely powerful and versatile jQuery cycle plugin. YMMV.

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Bilbo Blogger

The file descriptors can be set at the system level and at the shell level:

Check how many your system allows:

cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max

This value can be set to a high number, probably to several 100k without major issues. For now you might try:

echo “65536″ >/proc/sys/fs/file-max

You could also add

fs.file-max = 65536

to

/etc/sysctl.conf

then run

sysctl -p

to reload sysctl.conf

For the shell type

ulimit -n

to get the number of file descriptors.

You can set for example

* soft nofile 8192
* hard nofile 8192

in

/etc/security/limits.conf

to increase the number.

After increasing these values I have not had any issues with Netbeans as described above for several months now. Hope it helps.

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Bilbo Blogger

So I proceeded like this:

Install dependencies:

sudo apt-get install kdelibs5-dev kdepimlibs5-dev libboost-dev libqt4-sql-sqlite

Get the source from http://www.ohloh.net/p/bilbo/download?filename=bilbo-1.0-src.tar.gz&projects_id=bilbo

Unpack,

sudo tar -xzvf bilbo-1.0-src.tar.gz

Then just follow the steps from the readme:

cd bilbo

mkdir build

cd build

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`kde4-config –prefix` ..

make

sudo make install OR su -c ‘make install’

Then I had to manually install the bilbo.desktop file for some reason, so in the directory where you unpacked bilbo:

sudo desktop-file-install bilbo.desktop

Not sure yet whether bilbo/blogilo is really the ultimate blog client for Linux, but so far it seems stable and feature rich and I’ll retire my Blogjet app for now, the HTML it created was somewhat horrible, with FONT tags and such.

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Bilbo Blogger

Btw, setting an image size in Bilbo after adding the image crashes Bilbo, but only after the post was saved locally. So add your images first, then “Save Locally” before this bug is fixed.

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Bilbo Blogger

Mac OS X: All-inclusive pampering in some pseudo-hip resort with some “culturally aware” excursions thrown in.

Windows: Package holiday with the Joneses.

‘Nuff said.

So I was looking for a way to display small flags found at famfamfam and link them to the “localized” versions of the current uri in all pages of the application, so that for example

/widget/8/edit

would become

/de/widget/8/edit

and

/

would become

/de/

Having said routing_filter installed, I created this little helper method in application_helper.rb:

#application_helper.rb

def localize_current_path(locale)
    current_uri = request.env['PATH_INFO']
    my_path = ActionController::Routing::Routes.recognize_path current_uri, :method => :get
    #above works only with :get, you could pass in the current method with :method => request.method.to_sym
    url_for(my_path.merge!(:locale => locale))
  end

This code demonstrates:

• getting the elements that make up the current route with ActionController::Routing::Routes.recognize_path, this method returns a hash
• merging the locale into said hash
• generating the new url with url_for

The helper can now be easily used in the view like so (code is adjusted for the famfamfam British flag whose name is gb.gif):

#app/views/shared/_little_flags.html.erb

<%  {:de => “Deutsch”, :en => “English”, :th =>”Thai”}.each_pair do |key, value| %>
        <%= link_to image_tag(“famfamfam/flags/gif/#{key == :en ? “gb” : key}.gif”, :alt => value, :title => value),
                                 localize_current_path(key) %>
        <%end%>

Hope it helps.

Nested model forms built into Rails became the most requested feature and release 2.3 finally delivered with the accepts_nested_attributes_for function. Still, challenges remained, especially when trying to generate form elements on the client.

A suggested solution was an altered form builder pre-populated with the nested models, which was published in the complex forms sample application. This solution was ported to support jQuery, but an extension to multi-level nesting (> 2 levels) was still lacking.

Now a fork of the complex forms examples show off a solution with any level of nesting that is extremely easy to implement.

As ryanb states in his answer to this question on stackoverflow, proceed like so:

git clone git://github.com/ryanb/complex-form-examples.git
cd complex-form-examples
git checkout -b deep origin/deep
rake db:migrate
script/server

What about jQuery? Very easy. Simply replace the two functions in application.js with

function insert_fields(link, method, content) {
    var new_id = new Date().getTime();
    var regexp = new RegExp(”new_” + method, “g”)
    $(link).before(content.replace(regexp, new_id));
}

function remove_fields(link) {
    var hidden_field = $(link).prev(”input[type=hidden]“);
    if (hidden_field) {
        hidden_field.val(’1′);
    }
    $(link).closest(”.fields”).hide();
    } 

Complex forms with multiple levels of nesting is finally upon us. And super easy to implement.

Update: As jQuery won’t be able to see the newly added elements (because binding took place at $(document).ready()), check out jQuery live and the livequery plugin. The latter supports more events, including the onchange of a select and also works with jQuery < 1.3.

xrandr –output LVDS –set BACKLIGHT_CONTROL combination

The screen will flicker when you run this but your function keys might just start working. You might add this command to your startup scripts. YMMV.

So I tried a few solutions such as this which uses the auto_complete_jquery plugin,  as well as more involved solutions such as this and this one which uses HAML. However, I didn’t want to write javascript and also have all the helpers of the original plugin, to implement the solution presented in Railscast 102, with a RESTful call to the correct controller (the original plug-in doesn’t work RESTfully in its default configuration).

I ended up using the jrails_auto_complete plugin and it works fine so far. Be sure though to include all js files included with project. Aside from some minor styling issues it seems to work just like the original auto_complete plugin with the same helpers and the code used in the Railscast.

Here’s a sample text_field_with_auto_complete tag using the auto_update_element/afterUpdateElement callback which fires when the selection is made:

    <%= text_field_with_auto_complete :hotel_search,
      :destination_code, {:size => 30 },
      {:url => (destinations_path(:format => :js)),
      :method => :get,
      :param_name => ’search’,
    :after_update_element => “function(element,value){alert(’You have chosen ‘ +
      $(\”#hotel_search_destination_code\”).val());}”
    } %>

 Of course this cries out for being extracted into a helper but it can be hard to get the syntax right, especially for the callback.